This is a Mozilla message, by the way, so any troubleshooting advice you find for that message pertaining to Firefox would apply here as well. But really it just means something is preventing Zotero from accessing that directory properly.

I'm afraid there's not really much else we can tell you. This obviously works fine for the vast majority of people, so it's something particular to your system that you'll need to debug. Bear in mind that people have been using Zotero Standalone for the last 6 years, so if this were a standard problem with a standard solution, we'd know about it.

If you have a Firefox installation, you can try copying its Profiles folder to C:\Users\:username:\AppData\Roaming\Zotero\Zotero\Profiles and seeing if that works. (If so, you can clean it up a bit after.)

Failing that, you might be able to monitor disk access with a separate tool (e.g., DiskMon, though I'm not sure if that shows the actual files that a process tries to access).

(There are also some low-level logging options for Mozilla code that you could use if you have Cygwin installed, but if you don't know what that is, it's not worth worrying about, since it's pretty complicated and unlikely to actually show anything useful.)

Just to note for others who come across this, you definitely shouldn't need to run Zotero in administrator mode, and we strongly discourage it (both for security reasons and because, once you do, it becomes much more likely that you'll need to do so in the future to fix other problems, unless you correct a lot of file permissions). The fix here would just be figuring out what's preventing your current user account or Zotero from being able to write to the profile directory (within C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Zotero\Zotero\Profiles) or the cache directory (within C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Zotero\Zotero\Profiles). That could be permissions, the Windows Read-Only attribute, or security software.

Again, the code here is from the underlying Firefox components that Zotero uses — Zotero's own code isn't even running at this point. It's possible that some security software could flag Zotero as being part of Firefox and prevent it from writing outside of expected Firefox locations, but that's purely speculation.

Also note that this error is entirely unrelated to the Zotero data directory at C:\Users\username\Zotero.

The otherwise extremely helpful guru dstillman has unfortunately not been able to help anybody with this problem

You just linked to two threads where we resolved the person's problem.

The problem is as I say in my previous post above: something preventing Zotero from writing to either the profile directory or the cache directory. You don't say if you checked the latter.

Rename both /Users/:username:/Library/Application Support/Zotero and /Users/:username:/Library/Caches/Zotero to Zotero-Old and try again as a normal user.

Hi,

I have the same error message, but the two Profile folder mentioned above are empty [the profile directory (within C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Zotero\Zotero\Profiles) and the cache directory (within C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Zotero\Zotero\Profiles)].

Is there a way to recreate the files which are supposed to be in those folders ?

Thanks,

François

So many thanks,

François Maurice

To be clear, you definitely don't have to delete your Zotero data directory ("Zotero" in the home directory by default) and resync. As I say above, the only folders you would have to fix permissions on (or delete and allow to be recreated) would be the profile or cache directories.

The cache folder on Linux is in ~/.cache/zotero. (It'd be good if you could check the permissions within that before fixing it to see what the problem was.)

(Unrelated to Zotero, but note too that, while it doesn't matter too much on a personal system, you should never run chmod -R 777 on a Linux system, even when troubleshooting. Since you run programs as your own user, if the directory/file is owned by you then only the user part is necessary, and you don't want to set non-executable files as executable by you or anyone else. You can fix these recursively using find /path/to/folder -type d -exec chmod 700 {} \; and find /path/to/folder -type f -exec chmod 600 {} \;.)

The commands I give above are the way to correct this. If you run `chmod -R a-x` on a directory you'll break access to it and all subdirectories.

Or do you just mean that I should run both on ~/.zotero and/or ~/Documents/Zotero\ storage ?

(But you shouldn't really run any terminal command if you don't understand exactly what it does, so if you don't understand the ones I gave, you should research those first.)

I had this issue and it turned out to be caused by Zotero having been installed by root rather than user when I installed in the /opt/ folder in Ubuntu-Linux. had to go back and change owner in all zotero folders from "root" to "username", not least the zotero folder in the .cache folder in the home directory.

$sudo chown snerx:snerx -Rv zotero

That solved the "Your Zotero profile cannot be loaded..." problem.

does the official installer also launch Zotero as part of the install? That would explain it.

There is no official installer on Linux, so no.

Yeah, the official tarball includes a script to update the .desktop file so that the icon shows up properly, but that doesn't start Zotero.

dstillman's comment (above) just worked like a charm! thanks