Power BI Desktop - Error at startup - Named Pipe Connections

[Anonymous]

We are experiencing problems with PowerBI desktop clients.

We have an application which calls a service on a named pipe connection.

When this service is running we are experiencing problems with Power Bi Desktop. 

We were able to reproduce this error by running "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Desktop\bin\PBIDesktop.exe" as a test user with normal privileges.

I see that a new named pipe, with what seems like an random name, is created as soon as the our service is started. It seems like Power Bi in some way tries to access this named pipe, but have insufficient rights to do so. Running the application as an administrator is working as expected (but is not a viable option, as our users are not being given admin rights under any circumstances). The same behavior is also observed on client computer running Windows 10 after installation of this service.

With our service stopped:

With our service running.

We also looked into some error messages in the event logs, but these does not seem to be related to this problem. The errors relates to the events mentioned in this article: Perflib/ PerfNet Errors generated on VDA (citrix.com).

Could you please follow up with your team and see what can be done to solve the issue with Power BI.

[v-alq-msft]

Hi, @Anonymous 

I wonder if  the versions of Power BI Desktop are all up-to-date. I am unable to reproduce your scenario. Here are some information about running Power BI Desktop with administrator privilege:

'You can instead successfully launch Power BI Desktop as administrator, which also allows Power BI Desktop to successfully open. It's still recommended that you install the latest version of Power BI On-premises data gateway, as described earlier.

Power BI Desktop is engineered as a multiprocess architecture, and several of these processes communicate using Windows named pipes. There may be other processes that interfere with those named pipes. The most common reason for such interference is security, including situations where antivirus software or firewalls may block the pipes or redirect traffic to a specific port. Opening Power BI Desktop with administrator privilege may resolve that issue. If you can't open with administrator privilege, ask your administrator to determine which security rules are preventing named pipes from properly communicating. Then, add Power BI Desktop and its respective subprocesses to allow lists.'

For further information, you may refer to the document .

You may also create a support ticket here for further help if you have a pro license.

Best Regards

Allan

[AHUEBSCH]

Dear all,

I am facing the same issue.

Can not start power bi due to above mentioned error message. How can I fix?

[CJNewCOR]

I am also experiencing this issue since 2017.
We are in a domain enviroment where no users are allowed to have local Admin rights.

The solution to give them admin rights , or 'run as admin' does not work for our security posture.

I can not believe this issue still persists after all this time and yet I have more staff inquring if they can have this product loaded. 
As it stands we can not.

My only 'solution' to this issue is to 'run as' an admin user and tell them not to close the app...or let me know when I need to run it again. 

It is 2021 Microsoft. This should not require admin rights to run.