The file "WoW.exe" could not be found

Posted May 20th, 2009 in Applications

I play a little bit of World of Warcraft every now and then and after re-installing my Windows 7 Beta 32 bit to Windows 7 Release Candidate 64 bit got the error message "The file 'WoW.exe' could not be found. If this problem persists, you may be able to solve it by uninstalling and then reinstalling the game. If you are unable to correct this problem, please contact Blizzard Technical Support."

I got this message when running the launcher application which first checks to see if there are any patches to install. If it does (which it did when I got this error message) it downloads the patch file and then install it into the current installation.

The UAC prompt came up before it attempted to install the patch and I clicked the "Yes" button and then it failed with the above error message. I didn't particularly want to have to reinstall because that would mean downloading many GB of program files etc so had a quick trawl on the Internet for the solution.

It turns out that you need to run the Launcher.exe file as Administrator to correctly install the patch. I find this odd that this needs to be done when you've been given the prompt to escalate privileges but this is Windows after all...

So open up Windows Explorer and find the folder WOW is installed to. It'll be something like
"C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft" (although on my machine I installed it to "C:\Games\World of Warcraft") and right-click the application file Launcher.exe. Select the "Run as Administrator" option and then click "Yes" when prompted.

The launcher will then run, install the patch and away you go. I'd recommend quitting the launcher after the patch has installed, and then re-run it normally as an ordinary user before actually playing to avoid any issues while playing. It's best not to run the actual game as administrator.