Windows 10

Windows 10 has a known upgrade bug where the upgrade process will set certain directories (often the “My Documents” directory) to be read-only when run without administrator privileges.  Passwords Plus requires write access to its database (which is stored in a directory under My Documents) and will actually crash if it can’t open the database with write access (PWP should obviously not crash, but that doesn’t change the fact that write access is required to its data).  Running PWP after the installer completes gets around this problem because installers run with administrator privileges.

So, this crash will not happen if PWP is run with administrator privileges (right-click on the Passwords Plus app and choose “Run as Administrator”).  However, customers would need to right click to launch PWP every time, so this is not a great solution.

A better solution is to get write access back for the user on the My Documents folder.  This will likely prevent problems with other applications that need access to My Documents, too.  We have not actually tested this (none of our Windows 10 machines exhibited the upgrade bug), but users should be able to accomplish write access by right-clicking on the “My Documents” folder and choosing “Properties”, then clicking the “Security” tab and then pressing the “Edit” button to modify permissions.  They’ll just want to make sure that their user has full permissions.

Below are a handful of articles documenting this bug – there is more information online, just search for “Windows 10 permissions bug”

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-security/dont-have-permission-to-write-to-documents-folder/b0c875c4-62cc-42b7-878a-83b23d6bea68

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-security/folder-and-file-permissions-changed-in-windows-10/38bb51a5-8cfb-4349-b635-0fdae1287eb0?auth=1

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-start/files-are-now-readonly-after-updating-win7-to-10/411c2358-28d9-49e2-a841-88f3a61e776c

Windows 7 and 8

This issues is quite rare on Windows 7 and 8, though it has been seen.  If you have a database that is locked against write access on Windows 7 or Windows 8, there may be another process installed on your machine that is interfering with Passwords Plus access to its data. 

First, follow the steps above for Windows 10 to make sure there is not a simple permissions problem on your machine.  If you do have write permissions to My Documents, then try to identify the program that is interfering with Passwords Plus.  Start by disabling anti-virus and automatic backup software to see if one of those programs is locking your database – if it is, you will want to look into whether or not you can create an exception in that program so that it leaves the Passwords Plus CS directory (located in My Documents) alone.