ExifTool stops working under Windows 10

[leahcimi]

I have just installed a trial version of imatch5 and although I initially had the same probleml, setting exiftool to 'Run as Administrator' solved it.
Oddly however, using the same, and latest, version of exiftool for exiftoolGUI and Geosetter, and again setting exiftool to 'Run as Administrator', still causes the problem.
I'm confused!

[Phil Harvey]

Here are other threads talking about Windows 10 problems: 1, 2.

There is mention in one of them that exiftool starts from the Desktop but not from the Windows directory.

- Phil

[Tom S]

I thought I'd give some feedback that might prove useful. I recently installed a trial version of IMatch5 on a machine that was running Windows 8.1 and had some issues with exiftool not being able to read from the xmp sidecar files that were in the same folder as my raw nef files when I indexed them in IMatch. According to the IMatch log files, it seemed to be because exiftool was unable to perform some write operations in the Temp folder. I tried changing folder permissions but was unable to resolve the issue so I uninstalled IMatch.

A week or two later, I upgraded my system to Windows 10. After reinstalling IMatch on my Windows 10 machine, I was now unable to get it to open completely unless I ran it as administrator. It would start to load the database and just hang indefinitely. Again, the problem seemed to be related to exiftool, according to Mario from IMatch after looking at logs. After some experimentation I was able to get IMatch working by replacing the exiftool executable with an older version. The version that came with IMatch was 9.9.9.0. I was successful running it with exiftool versions 9.7.5.0, which I had stored elsewhere from an earlier download. After getting that to work I downloaded and tested versions 10.0.0.0 and 10.0.7.0. Both work fine. If I put the version 9.9.9.0 back into the IMatch directory, I still can't get IMatch to completely open it's database unless I run IMatch as administrator.

I have no explanation for this but I though it might be helpful to somebody else who is trying to resolve a similar issue. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why this wouldn't work and never did find an answer until I stumbled into it myself.