Hey everyone,
I’m trying to build a scene, but I’m getting the following error:
The file in question exists, but the path in the error message is garbled (you can also see it for some reason mixes backward and forward slashes?). I haven’t found anything while googling, any help on how to resolve this would be greatly appreciated!
Best, Christoph
Hey fellow “Projekte” developer. 
Back and forward slashes should pose no issue on Windows.
The path length on first sight seems to fit the 260 char length limit on Windows but … can’t hurt, if anything else fails, to temporarily move the project to a shortened path or to the user’s “Documents” folder due ensure permissions aren’t an issue.
I’d check the following:
Is the XML file open in another program?
Not every app plays nicely and may hold a lock on the file.
Or a lock wasn’t released and the process crashed, in which case it should work again after a reboot.
Disk (nearly) full?
Permissions set correctly?
I’m always suspecting permission issues if projects are stored outside the “Users” home dir.
Check that user accound has “full control” rights in Projekte_Local and that the owner matches the user and that permissions are inherited (click on “Advanced” on the Security tab):
Got a virus scanner?
At the very least, exclude Projekte_Local from live/online virus and malware scans. I’d rather uninstall them though, Microsoft Defender is good enough and far less intrusive as the “paid” scanners which tend to try hard to proove to users that their investment was sound by alerting and “protecting” you from anything out of the ordinary such as … building an executable from source code that accesses the Internet! F*** Heuristics.
Heyo, thanks a lot for the input (haha Projekte gives it away^^). To address your suggestions:
Just something I noticed - the path in the error message is also incorrect. The real file lives in:
\Assets\ThirdPartyAssets\RobotecAI_Ros2ForUnity
but the error message shows
\Assets/Ros2ForUnity
Does the underscore somehow create a mess here?
Hmmm if you could easily change and remove that underscore it would be a thing to try.
I also learned today that Windows has a “protection history” which you can look up to see if Windows blocked access to files or folders:
Brings up this long list of items with most recent incident at the top. If you open details you can see the process and path:
Hey, sorry for the late response, things were busy over the weekend. 
I checked and I don’t see any blocked access in the Protection History. I also tried renaming the file with no success. I then also tried deleting the file (it’s part of a third-party repo and seems to not be critical), but I still got the error, which made me quite suspicious. I need to delve deeper into why it still tried to add a file that doesn’t exist anymore.
Meanwhile, any other tips are always welcome… ^^
Cheers, Christoph
Hi!! I’d like to thank you for helping me with my problem.
I was having this problem. I am a new user and I just clicked past all of these warning and stuff. Unity still lets you use the program regardless of these errors existing.
I did a tutorial and when it came time to build the project I was having “build failed at 5 seconds” errors. I didnt knwo what the problem was. Everyone suggests uninstalling this and that. None of it worked.
My desparate searching led me to believe that maybe it was all those errors up front that were the issue. Which led me to this post and your answer.
Reading you light insight
“I’m always suspecting permission issues if projects are stored outside the “Users” home dir.”"
My head turned to my external harddrive and I instantly said “No it cant be that easy.”
I took all the files from my external and dropped them raw onto my desktop.
Build successful.
This is a simple issue that should really be addressed more upfront. A user should know if a simple external hard drive EXISTING is an issue.
Thank you for your expertise and your thoroughness.
Was your external hard drive formatted on a system other than yours? Including a previous Windows installation. Because that may leave the drive with permissions or ownership of a non-existing account/user and thus causing such permission issues.
Another culprit could be the file system itself, NTFS should always be fine but there are known issues with some packages when the project is located on an ExFAT formatted drive.
