Windows UAC Virtualization headache nightmare.

Hey I just spent like 2 hours trying to figure out why my Mushclient could view all of my files inside of my MUSHClient directory, but I could not find them myself in my file explorer or even using an admin privilege command prompt.

To cut a very, very, very, very, very long (and very, very, very, very, very painful) story short, if you install MushClient into your programs folder, Windows lies to MushClient about its' active directory. For reasons. It's very convincing.

MushClient is actually running in your %APPDATA% directory, or something. Inside of "\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\MUSHClient". So that's where it's saving the files to, and it's VERY hard to find them if you don't already know about all of this nonsensical "UAC Virtualization" garbage that I never voluntarily enabled but somehow it exists and made the last 2-3 hours of my life absolutely miserable.

Anyway, my bandaid solution was to set mushclient.exe to run as an administrator (I already did that before, but apparently I only did it to a shortcut, and I've recently been launching it from a DIFFERENT shortcut, I guess. . . . . .), and to move all of the files that I've been saving into that directory over the past week or so into the ACTUAL directory. Now all of my files are happy and live together. Huzzah.

I'm not sure whether it's something you'd be interested in investigating and fixing or not. I'm assuming this garbage isn't an issue if you don't actually "install" the program and just manually extract it to some directory that DOESN'T have "punish me daddy" settings turned on by Windows, or whatever. I don't know.

The last 3 hours have been very sad.

It's a known issue, but you would have to know to search for it. For example:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=14626

Sorry about that.

Personally I think it is confusing the way Windows does that, but there it is.

I don't know if there's actually anything that MUSHclient can do about this without breaking its convenient self-containment.

Nick, does your forum allow stickying threads?


Yeah. I usually tell Aardwolf players to put their MUSHclient folder on their desktop because of this.

No, but I can add links or general HTML to the start of a section, like here for example:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?bbtopic_id=7

Which post did you want to "sticky"?

You can use the installer, just install to somewhere like "(My) Documents" or the Desktop.

It may perhaps be worthwhile to have it default elsewhere than a protected directory, if possible - although I'm sure this is a relatively rare issue for people to run into. The inconsistency is derived from the fact that I used to execute the client through an administrative elevated shortcut (I believe), and recently have been launching it through a different one, lacking said permissions - and even only then presented an issue due to my wanting to edit files created by MUSHClient outside of MUSHClient, so it's probably a pretty hyper specific issue.

Perhaps having MUSHClient save data to an %APPDATA% folder, or something, would also avoid this problem - but I'm unsure whether that would present any other issues as well, and it would likely cause issues for more people than would resolve future issues in such an unlikely scenario as it may be able to do so.

Anyway, sorry to make much commotion about a relative nonissue. (:

Forcing a switch to a different folder may break existing plugins, so I am reluctant to make such changes.

I've realized that I've launched other applications that could recognize whether or not they've been launched with elevated administrative privileges. I'm unsure whether or not MUSHClient would be able to make that check, but it may be worth adding a little dialogue box (that has a 'never remind me again!' box) upon startup when detecting not launched in administrative mode (perhaps only if its run directory is one of these silly protected windows directories?) or not, and informing them of potential inconsistencies with file location if they elect to continue running their client without administrative permissions?

Interesting idea, I'll look into it.