Unable to use TweetDeck on Windows due to "Ooops, TweetDeck can't find your data" and "Sorry, Adobe

Posted by Matt on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Matt
Published on 2009-10-18T20:46:45Z Indexed on 2010/05/18 22:40 UTC
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I'm running Adobe AIR 1.5.2 (latest) on Windows 7 (64-bit RTM) and downloaded TweetDeck 0.31.1 (latest). When I run TweetDeck I get the following errors:

Ooops, TweetDeck can't find your data

and

Sorry, Adobe AIR has a problem running on this computer

Other AIR applications install and run fine. I've uninstalled both TweetDeck and AIR and reinstalled. Following the uninstalls I've also removed all on-disk references to both TweetDeck and AIR, but no luck.

UPDATE: Using Process Monitor I did a trace of Tweetdeck from the moment it launched until the first error occurred. I saw the following information in the output of the trace:

1 5:22:18.6522338 PM TweetDeck.exe 5580 
CreateFile
D:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\rs\??\d:\Use\myusername\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\AIR\ELS\TweetDeckFast.F9107117265DB7542C1A806C8DB837742CE14C21.1\PrivateEncryptedDatak
NAME INVALID
Desired Access: Generic Write, Read Attributes, Disposition: OverwriteIf, 
Options: Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Non-Directory File, 
Attributes: N, 
ShareMode: Read, Write, 
AllocationSize: 0

In this trace output, Tweetdeck.exe is trying to create the file

D:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\rs\??\d:\Use\myusername\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\AIR\ELS\TweetDeckFast.F9107117265DB7542C1A806C8DB837742CE14C21.1\PrivateEncryptedDatak

but the path specified is invalid. When looking at the path you can see that it is indeed an invalid path. First, there’s the “??” portion which doesn’t exist in the file system since the “?” is an invalid character in Windows/NTFS file systems. Additionally, looking at this path, it actually seems to be composed of two parts (is the "??" a delimiter?):

Part 1: D:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\rs\??
Part 2: d:\Use\myusername\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\AIR\ELS \TweetDeckFast.F9107117265DB7542C1A806C8DB837742CE14C21.1\PrivateEncryptedDatak

(the problem here is that d:\Use... doesn’t even exist.

What seems to be happening here is that Tweetdeck is looking for the user credentials (the “PrivateEncryptedDatak” file) but it’s looking in the wrong place, can’t find the file, and hence the error that Tweetdeck is giving (shown in the screenshot).

I'm trying to determine how TweetDeck is getting this path. I searched the contents of all files on my hard disk hoping to find some TweetDeck or Adobe AIR configuration file containing this incorrect path, but I was unable to find anything.

UPDATE: See Carl's comment regarding directory junctions and symbolic links under my accepted answer. This ended up being the problem.


Edit by Gnoupi: People, the answer section is there to provide an actual ANSWER, not to say you have the same issue. It doesn't help anyone that you have the same problem. Eventually, if you think this is really worth mentioning, put it as a comment under the question.

But simply, if what you want to add is not an answer to the question, then don't post it as an answer. This is not a forum, I recommend new users to read the FAQ: http://superuser.com/faq

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