Wednesday, May 14, 2014

ProcessExplorer "Unable to extract 64-bit image" error

The ProcessExplorer program is a very useful utility. I needed it today to track down a file lock, but upon trying to run it on my Windows 7 64-bit machine, I kept getting an error telling me "Unable to extract 64-bit image...". A few Google searches mentioned this being caused by a permissions error, but this didn't make sense since I'm an admin on the machine. After I ran across this on the SysInternals forum, then I realized that those saying that permissions were the problem weren't wrong, but that their answer wasn't specific enough.

Upon running the ProcessExplorer executable, it will extract the 64-bit version of the program to the AppData/Local/Temp folder and attempt to run from there. However, if you're like me and have restrictions on applications running from the Temp folder, this will cause the error. To get around it I simply navigated to my temp directory and move the procexp64.exe file to my Desktop and executed it from there. It opened right up and I was able to get back to what I needed ProcessExplorer for.

By default the AppData directory is hidden. The quickest way to get there is by clicking Start, then type %tmp% into the Search box and press Enter. Or type the path directly into the navigation bar, or choose to show hidden files.

Full path to the temp folder is C:\Users\"your username"\AppData\Local\Temp

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, fixed the problem, very grateful to you!

Anonymous said...

Perfectly explained. Worked for me as well. Thank you very much!

Anonymous said...

perfect solution. thanks a lot!

Igor Vuković said...

This is not a answer. i want to un proc. explorer with CTRL+SHIFT+ESCPE

rslygh said...

If you want to replace Task Manager with Process Explorer the process to do that is still the same whether or not you run into the problem the blog post is addressing. Open Process Explorer and go to Options->Replace Task Manager.

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much. Before even searching online, I tried copying procexp.exe to the desktop, which didn’t work. Reason being is because I believe procexp.exe by default, tries to run the 64-bit version. It does this by copying procexp64.exe to your \local\Temp\ directory. So running the procexp64.exe version as admin worked for me.