This issue sounds like many other issues already asked here, but I'm not able to find anything that's directly related to my case.

We're working on a join DEV remote desktop server with individual VS Code configurations per each user. I'm trying to set mine up and install extensions, but when I click install on the extension I want, a series of weird things happen.

VS Code begins to download the extension. It stores the extension files in the cache at [...]\AppData\Roaming\Code\CachedExtensionVSIXs, but when it is done downloading it, it claims that it can't write the file. The error thrown is 'Unable to write file' and then gives the path to the CachedExtensions along with the temp name given to the extension installation. It is also given an error definition of Error: net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET).

If I go to the folder location in Explorer, the file is very much there. If I move to my own folder in Users for VS Code extensions, the extension file is also there. The only thing that doesn't happen, is that the extensions.json file is not updated with metadata about the extension, so VS Code doesn't know that the extension actually has been installed.

If I manually download the extension file and try to install via VSIX, the error message thrown is [error] [Window] Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'identifier'): TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'identifier').

This bit sounds like it could be about the extensions.json file (based on the 'identifier' bit), but it isn't clear. The message is from the workbench.desktop.main.js script.

The theory then is that maybe the permissions to the extensions.json is hampered, but if I try to delete the extensions.json file and reopen VS Code, VS Code successfully recreates the file, albeit of course still empty. The fact that the file is created tells me that VS Code is able to write to the file. It also clearly can write to both the cache as well as the user folder, as the extension files exists there after the attempt.

I also ended up getting some admin privileges and tried launching VS Code as an administrator, but this changed nothing.

Me and surrounding colleagues are pretty stumped. This doesn't happen for the other developers. It's just me having this issue. Any ideas that could lead us to a resoltion would be greatly appreciated.