Acces is denied

Question

After an update to Visual Studio Pro (V 16.11.11), I am no longer able to execute this simple snippet of code:

System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(@"C:\Users\U210237\Documents");

I now get this error:

What do I now need to do to prevent this error. Previous versions did not generate this errors. I have admin privilege on my machine to I should not get this error.

Answer 1

Try

Process.Start("explorer.exe", 
    Environment.GetFolderPath(
        Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments));

And this will work also

var p = new Process { StartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo("C:\\Users\\paynek\\Documents") { UseShellExecute = true } };
p.Start();

I'd go with the first simply because there is less code and we get the same outcome.

Answer 2

Explorer is a single-instance application. Attempts to start a second instance just hand-off the requested action to the already running instance. So the instance of explorer that attempts to open the file system folder that belongs to a different user is made by the process that is running as the logged-on user. Even when the logged-on user is a member of the Administrators group explorer is running with a filtered token that does not contain elevated privileges. And running the code in an elevated process doesn't change anything. The result is the same -- the explorer process that attempts the folder access is running without elevated privilege so the attempt to open a different accounts profile folders fails with access denied.

See Explorer is a single-instance application, but you can find other ways to get the effect of running a separate instance