Latest Cursor installer exe blocked from running from TEMP dir

[ashleysommer (Ash)]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I have a bit of an unusual setup, my work PC is Windows 11 with some strict security policies.
One of the restrictions is that exe files are blocked from executing from the default windows Temp directory: %APPDATA%/Local/Temp.

This affects the cursor installer because even if you run from another directory, eg, C:\Downloads, the installer package unpacks itself to %TEMP% and then runs from there. So I get the erorr message “Unable to execute file in the temporary directory. Setup aborted.” “Error 5: Access is denied.”

This is not a new issue, all CursorUserSetup installer packages do this, but normally I get around the issue by overriding the $ENV:TEMP and $ENV:TMP environment variables in my shell to point to a different temp directory that can run executables.

$ENV:TEMP = "C:\Scripts\Temp"
$ENV:TMP = "C:\Scripts\Temp"
.\CursorUserSetup-x64.exe

This works for Cursor installer for v2.0.34 and v2.0.54.

However the newest installers don’t seem to honor the environment vars.
When I run CursorUserSetup-x64-2.0.75.exe with the correct ENV vars set, the installer ignores them, and still tries to run from %APPDATA%/Local/Temp, and throws that error.

Did something change in the way that the installer reads Env vars between v2.0.54 and v2.0.75?

Steps to Reproduce

Download latest CursorUserSetup-x64-2.0.75.exe, move it to an executable location (like Downloads folder).
Set $ENV:TMP and $ENV:TEMP env vars to a known executable location, like c:\Scripts\Temp.
Run the installer.
See error in screenshot.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Curent version v2.0.54
Affected new version v2.0.75

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - New Cursor version is unusable because installer doesn’t work.

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the report. This looks like a regression - I’ll escalate it to the engineering team since it blocks upgrades in enterprise Windows environments with security policies.

In the meantime, you can stay on v2.0.54 until it’s fixed.

[ashleysommer (Ash)]

I found a workaround to this by installing the update to v2.0.75 on a different PC (that doesn’t have security policies) then zipped up that Cursor directory and sent it to the work PC.
I then unzipped that over my v2.0.54 installation.
I started it, and it runs fine as v2.0.75.

Another solution to this issue would be if Cursor released a “Zip file” distribution of the IDE, as an alternative to the installer executables.

[ashleysommer (Ash)]

Note, latest release v2.0.77 works fine when I set alternative TEMP directory via ENV vars.
So perhaps it was just v2.0.75 that was affected?

I don’t know if it was real regression, that was fixed in v2.0.77, or whether there was some other odd quirk that prevented v2.0.75 from installing correctly (perhaps it hit some Windows Defender false positive?).