Looks like a permission problem maybe? Please try to run Blender as Administrator and see if the last 2 errors still occur.

You are right, Thomas. If I run the blender.exe as Administrator, this problem goes away and Blender enters the splash screen successfully.

This could be because Windows User Account Control warns the installation is from an "Unknown Publisher" during installation and even during startup. So telling Blender to continue after that warning still does not resolve the permissions issue.

I don't know how an application is packaged up with a publisher indicated. Previous versions of Blender have not (and do not) have this issue.

Thank you for looking at this.

Shall we close then, or should do we plan to get a certificate. @Martijn Berger (juicyfruit), any ideas here?

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa364992%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

We check environment variables on windows else we fall back to the blender directory.

1. TEMP
2. TMP
3. TMPDIR

Windows GetTempPath function checks in this order:

1. The path specified by the TMP environment variable.
2. The path specified by the TEMP environment variable.
3. The path specified by the USERPROFILE environment variable.
4. The Windows directory.

It appears we could do better here.

Also for this concrete case:
.. something is wrong with this users profile as %TEMP% needs to be set to a valid location for a lot of other programs anyway,
C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Temp or so is a normal place for this where C:\Users\{username} should be the same as USERPROFILE
//

Could you maybe open a terminal (cmd) as the normal non admin user and paste the output of:

set TMP

set TEMP

set USERPROFILE

Set TMP
TMP=C:\Users\Dale\AppData\Local\Temp

Set TEMP
TEMP=C:\Users\Dale\AppData\Local\Temp

Set USERPROFILE
USERPROFILE=C:\Users\Dale

I am the only user on this desktop which was built with this profile. I have not customized any environment variables - at least not on purpose.

Thank you for exploring this.

[Update]
When I open my temp directory: C:\Users\Dale\AppData\Local\Temp, there are several blender folders there -- assuming from previous installations:

blender_a00456
blender_a06476
blender_a07452
blender_a07940
blender_a10408
blender_a13212
blender_a17520
blender_a20560

@Dale Forbes (daleforbes), okay your config and environment makes sense TMP, TEMP, and USERPROFILE are what you would expect.

I would assume is you use blender extracted from the zip file somewhere in a non installed location ( like My Documents) it just works ?

If .msi is available, I will use that so that is what I use almost all the time. I download the .msi to the Downloads folder and run from there.

When trying to troubleshoot 2.75 RC x, I used the .zip when the .msi was not working but I had the same results.

I installed testbuild2 of 2.76 and tested...

Without running as Administrator, the program now starts up normally which is an improvement over 2.75a. However, there appear to be errors upon exit so there still seems to be a permissions issue. I took snapshots of the command line messages upon startup and quit. Link below.

If I run blender.exe as Administrator, there are no problems. Very strange. I am the only user on my desktop and no other administrator issues with other apps. This problem started when I was running Win8.1. I should mention I'm on Win10 now.

Thanks for taking a look, guys.

Snapshop of messages

@Bastien Montagne (mont29) it is really hard to rule this a local issue. Ill make an .msi for the the real RC's. and we will check again at that time.

Now that 2.76 is out and we have yet to release 2.76a this would be a good time for feedback.

@Dale Forbes (daleforbes) can you you retest with 2.76 ?

Sorry for the late response, guys. I had tried with the production release of 2.76 and had the same results as 2.76 test 2.

However, with 2.76b, the problem seems to have been fixed. I no longer need to run blender.exe as administrator and no error messages appear in the startup or shutdown command line messages.

Thanks to everyone for their help. Do we know exactly what the issue was?

Cheers!
Dale