How to fix 'Access is denied' errors when trying to .quit() Chrome in Selenium WebDriver tests?

Question

Anyone know how to fix intermittent 'Access is denied' errors when trying to .quit() Chrome in Selenium WebDriver tests? It's happening about 1 in 10 times.

Here's the traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "C:\blah.py", line 30, in blah_test
 self.browser.quit()
 File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.15.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\chrome\webdriver.
py", line 62, in quit
 self.service.stop()
 File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.15.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\chrome\service.py
", line 94, in stop
 os.kill(self.process.pid, signal.SIGTERM)
WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied

The code is (I've simplified it here):

from selenium import webdriver
self.browser = webdriver.Chrome()
self.browser.quit()

I'm on Windows 7 using latest ChromeDriver.exe (version 17 I think it is) and latest Selenium (2.15) and Python 2.7.x.

Answer 1

I haven't run into that, but if it is a bug in Selenium, the easiest workaround would be to surround it in a try/catch and retry a few times. I would follow up by asking (or searching for existing answers) whether it is a known issue on the Selenium users forum.

• Aaron: Sam, is there an 'official' forum for Selenium you could link me to? Or at least whichever one is the most highly-trafficed / likely to get responses? Thanks.
• Sam Woods: Sorry, just noticed this. Yes, the selenium user forum is hosted on google groups: groups.google.com/group/selenium-users

Answer 2

I think this issue is not related with Selenium itself, but with python on Windows 7 (since it falls on os.kill method). How to fix it I don't have idea but there are some similar issues found while using words: access denied process python windows 7 on searching engine.