Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

I'm setting up a new computer, Windows 11 Home. I have an administrator account that I won't use for normal use, and a user account. I installed Qimage Ultimate 2023.112 from the administrator account, and under that account it works fine. But when I try to start it from my user account, I get the error message:

Qimage is unable to write to the folder:
C:\ProgramData\ddisoftware\Qimage

Please reinstall Qimage in a folder to
which you have write access.

(Screen capture also attached.) All the other software I've installed (MS Office, DxO, Affinity Photo, etc.) seems okay. Any suggestions? Thanks!

You can't install it as administrator and then run/use it as a (different) limited user.  Qimage is a per-user license so you need to install it as the user who intends to use it.  When you install it under a different account, the files all get "owned" by that administrator who is installing it.  Then when you use it as the limited user, that user doesn't have access to some files as they don't have permission to alter the admin's files.

The solution is to uninstall and reinstall as the limited user, elevating permissions during the install by supplying the admin credentials when prompted by the installer.  This is the proper way to install any software that installs as "current user" (as opposed to "all users").

Regards,
Mike

Thanks for the prompt reply, and that may be an issue, but it is not the issue. I uninstalled Qimage, copied the installer file over to the user account, switched to the user account, installed, ran, and got the same or a very similar error message. Huh. So I uninstalled again, and reinstalled again under the user account (i.e., for the second time), watching it closely. What I noticed is that even though I was under the user account, of course I had to enter the admin password to start the installer, and then the Qimage installer tried to put the AppData under the admin account instead of the user account. I manually pointed it to the same location except under the user account, and continued with the installation. After installing, I tried to run it, and got the same or a very similar error. See attached screen captures.

It looks like the install isn't completing or the registry isn't getting updated, maybe due to some leftover permission problems or antivirus interference.

You could try opening RegEdit under the limited user's account and go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ddisoftware\Qimage-U

Then open the AppFolder key (or create one if it doesn't exist) and make sure it is set to:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\ddisoftware\Qimage

Mike

Thanks, that RedEdit procedure seems to have worked. The only thing I struggled with there, as someone who only very rarely uses RegEdit, was that in RegEdit, Edit -> New -> Key produced a folder under Qimage-U; I did Edit -> New -> String Value, then made the name AppFolder and the data the correct path for the user account. After that Qimage started up fine.