I'm using Spring Boot with embedded tomcat, everything worked fine and suddenly I got the error :
Caused by: org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedServletContainerException: Unable to create tempDir. java.io.tmpdir is set to C:\Windows\
at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.AbstractEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.createTempDir(AbstractEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.java:183)
at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.tomcat.TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.getEmbeddedServletContainer(TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.java:165)
at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.createEmbeddedServletContainer(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:164)
at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.onRefresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:134)
... 11 common frames omitted
Caused by: java.io.IOException: Access is denied
at java.io.WinNTFileSystem.createFileExclusively(Native Method)
at java.io.File.createTempFile(File.java:2024)
at java.io.File.createTempFile(File.java:2070)
at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.AbstractEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.createTempDir(AbstractEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.java:174)
... 14 common frames omitted
I didn't do any manipulations with user or system variables.
My TEMP user variable is looking on C:/Users/me/AppData/Local/Temp , and I guess tomcat has to use this value insted of system one, which is actually C:/Windows/Temp
If you use IDEA check "Include parent environment variables" in Environment Variables window in the Run/Debug Configuration.