Package management initialization failed: Access Denied Error when opening Visual Studio 2017

Question

I'm getting the following error when opening VS 2017 on Windows 7 64-bit:

Package management initialization failed: Access Denied.

You can get more information by examining the file:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.<version>\ActivityLog.xml

---

It all started after I added my solution to SVN. I had no problems until I tried to add a file and got the following error:

Value does not fall within the expected range

I followed the steps mentioned in this answer and did a 'devenv /setup', after that I started getting the Package management initialization failed: Access Denied. error when opening VS. Now Visual Studio doesn't even start.

Has anyone else experienced this problem and resolved it?

Edit:

I tried starting as an administrator and it worked. But otherwise it doesn't.

Answer 1

It turns out that this is a bug, that hasn't yet been resolved. This error also occurs when starting Visual Studio after an update.

But there is a workaround from this thread that worked for me,

Delete the privateregistry.bin file from the following folder:

C:\users\%username%\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_<version id>\

This is however a temporary fix and resets the user's preferences. That's why it worked when I started it as an administrator, since the problem is user specific.

---

Update

This bug is supposedly fixed in the latest versions of Visual Studio. But for the bug fix to work, the old privateregistry.bin file still needs to be deleted.