Package management initialization failed: Access Denied Error when opening Visual Studio 2017

Question

I\'m getting the following error when opening VS 2017 on Windows 7 64-bit:

Package management initialization failed: Access Denied.

You ca

Answer 1

It turns out that this is a bug, that hasn't yet been resolved. This error also occurs when starting Visual Studio after an update.

But there is a workaround from this thread that worked for me,

Delete the privateregistry.bin file from the following folder:

C:\users\%username%\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_<version id>\

This is however a temporary fix and resets the user's preferences. That's why it worked when I started it as an administrator, since the problem is user specific.

---

Update

This bug is supposedly fixed in the latest versions of Visual Studio. But for the bug fix to work, the old privateregistry.bin file still needs to be deleted.

Answer 2

I had the same problem and when I looked at

 C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio 

I noticed that I had miltiple versions of visual studio meaning the current update might not have been successfull, as I was not able to delete the file that @Neil Patro says, I simply deleted the entire updates and all was ok. I guess adding this as an answer might help.

Answer 3

I had this issue after installing SSDT for VS 2017 in a new vs instance. So it's like I have two visual studio in my machine. To fix that, I uninstalled the SSDT package, restart my machine and reinstall it on the initial installed visual studio instance.

Answer 4

@neil-patrao answer works fine. To open the AppData folder try to type:

%AppData%

directly in the Address bar.

https://support.pointlogic.com/faq/troubleshooting/accessing-the-appdata-folder

Answer 5

Happened to me with an existing VS instance running, where I disabled an extension (VsChromium). Closing all VS instances solved the error and VS starts normally. Env: VS 2019 Pro, Win 10 x64, running as current user.