Thank you so much for the responses!

The good news is that with all the information you've given me, I think I know why this is happening and have put my machine into a state where it is hitting the error, so we can actually start looking into handling this case.

The bad news is that the only workaround we have here involves changing the permissions on your %TMP% directory, and I don't know how your current permissions ended up the way they are right now (so if they are changed back, profiling would be broken again).

It looks like your %TMP% directory has no (null) DACL set, such that any user has full access to it (I'm not sure if this is intentional on your part?). Our data collector runs under the system account and is just relying on inheriting permissions for the user set on the %TMP% to let the user access the files that collector writes out. Since there is no DACL, there is nothing to inherit, resulting in your user account (VS) not being able to access those files.

Two possible options here:

1. Explicitly set permissions - that are inheritable by subfolders and files - on %TMP% to allow full control to the system account (NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) and your user:

   icacls %TMP% /grant "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(OI)(CI)(F)"<br>icacls %TMP% /grant "<yourUserAccount>:(OI)(CI)(F)"

2. If the parent folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%) has inheritable permissions that include full access for the system account and your user, set %TMP% to just inherit its permissions:

   icacls %TMP% /inheritance:e

Since %TMP% is set to allow any user access, both of these options would make the access to it more restricted, so if you have some other user that is also requiring access to it, you'd need to explicitly add that user too.

This issue has been fixed and is now available in our latest update. You can download the update via the in-product notification or from here: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/ Thanks to everyone who provided feedback, votes and solutions for this problem.