How do i fix this Python Windows Error?

Question

When I invoke help("modules"), sometimes, but not always I stumble upon this error message:

WindowsError: [Error 5] : 'C:\\Users\\\USERNAME\\Application Data/*.*'

What's that? How do I fix it?

Answer 1

According to the Microsoft Error Codes website Error 5 denotes the error:

ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED 
5 (0x5)  Access is denied.

It seems that help accesses part your system that it has no access to - maybe try running one of the scripts that fails as administrator and see if it still produces an error.

Answer 2

I'm not an expert on this, but it seems to be a file access issue (see here).

In context, I would think that this might be caused by read/write operations on disk. If this is something that happens sporadically (as you mention), then I wouldn't worry too much about it.

However, if you still want to look further into it, I would suggest monitoring how much other data is being read from / written to disk while you make this call.

Hope this helps