Sign tool fails on fresh Windows install about squirrel.windows

[aviz]

Happens to us too.

[anaisbetts]

I'm not sure there is anything Squirrel can do here, we are invoking SignTool.exe from the SDK - if you can't sign executables, you're kinda out of luck. If your company has a Microsoft Support contract I would contact them and see if they can tell you more about this

[caesay]

It's worth noting that the version of signtool.exe which ships with Squirrel is very old - from the Windows 7 SDK. It might be worth trying to replace signtool.exe with a newer version - eg. from the Windows 10 or Windows 11 SDK. My fork of Squirrel has been updated to use v10.0.19041.

[danworley]

I had this exact issue and solved it by setting the SQUIRREL_TEMP environment variable to a directory path that our build process had access to. If you don't set the SQUIRREL_TEMP env var, your process will use the default %LocalAppData%\SquirrelTemp location, which for an Administrator provisioned account that is never used outside of a build process is actually in the reserved system32 directory (C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\SquirrelTemp). I figured that the signtool.exe process when squirrel runs it, might have problems writing to this directory, so I added the env var to override it, and was then able to once again sign without issue. Hope it helps!