Microsoft Defender has an optional feature called Controlled Folder Access, which is designed to protect sensitive folders from being modified by malicious software. This feature is not switched on by default and is only available if you are using Microsoft Defender Antivirus or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint; if you’re using a third party antivirus solution then the feature is not available.

Protected folders include obvious locations like the user’s Documents folder as well as the Public Documents folder, which is where XJTAG places a number of files, including example projects. When Controlled Folder Access is enabled the installer is unable to create these files and the installation fails. Since XJTAG v3.8.0, the installer detects this situation, reports an error and then doesn’t continue any further.

In XJTAG v3.11.4 a new command-line switch has been added to the installer that enables an alternative location to be specified for these shared files and so allow the installer to succeed when Controlled Folder Access is enabled. This only needs to be specified the first time XJTAG is installed for a new major release, i.e. it needs to be specified when installing XJTAG v3.11.x or v3.12.x for the first time, but not when upgrading from v3.11.4 to v3.11.5.

To specify the switch, the setup program must be run from the command-line:

Downloads\setup.exe /shared c:\XJTAG

Assuming that setup.exe is an installer for v3.11, then this would put all the shared files in a new folder called c:\XJTAG\XJTAG 3.11.