Help please! "Your Zotero profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible."

debspiv
Hi, I'm using a Windows 10 PC and my Zotero started giving me the following error today. Your Zotero profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible. I updated the program but I get the same error. I found my .../Zotero/Profiles folder and have backed that directory up. I don't want to uninstall it yet until I'm sure I've saved all my current changes. Is there an easy fix to this error or any other data I need to backup before trying uninstalling and re-installing? Thank you.
  • dstillman
    This could happen if you previously ran Zotero as an administrator and are now running it as a regular user.

    You should fix the permissions on the Zotero profile directory (within Roaming) so that your current user has access to all files and folders below it, and you should delete the cache directory within C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Zotero\Zotero\Profiles.
  • debspiv
    Thank you for responding! Weird, I'm still running under my user which is an administrator account. When I first click on Zotero, it says "Zotero is already running, but is not responding. The old Zotero process must be closed to open a new window." I hit "Close Zotero" and immediately I get the Profile error. So now my problem is, when I try to change permissions on the files you suggest, they are in use and attributes can't be changed. I started Task Manager and looked through every section to see if I could end any running Zotero tasks but I couldn't find any. So now I'm stuck in this loop between the two error messages and cant change permissions. What can I do to end all running Zotero processes?
  • debspiv
    At this point I'm going to put it on another PC but did not sync over the past few weeks, my bad! What file directories do I need to copy over to recover my most recent changes? Thanks again!
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