nRF Connect SDK always fails with error "not found"

Question

I am trying to follow along the Nordic DevAcademy courses for nRF Connect SDK and have a problem properly setting up the nRF Connect SDK. 
 I did as requested and installed the 'nRF Connect SDK for VS Code Extension pack". 
 The installation went smooth and successful (i.e. toolchain is installed successfully) 
 Later on I am asked to install a nRF Connect SDK and choose v2.5.0. The extension started cloning the SDK into c:
cs\v2.5.0 which took around 10 minutes (I watched a lot of GIT clones into that directory) and seemed to be finished successful from what I saw (exit code 0 in the end) but I got the message "installation failed"and I cannot build anything. 
 I then retried the same with v2.4.2 and v2.4.1 but just received the same errors. All the folders are there in c:
cs and have a size of > 1 GB. 
 I then tried doing it manually on the commandline: 
 nrfutil toolchain-manager launch --terminal
west init -m github.com/.../sdk-nrf --mr v2.5.0
west update
west zephyr-export

Everything ran smoothly. Opening an application in VS Code just shows again: "The nRF Connect SDK is required, but not found. Install the nRF Connect SDK". For some reason the VS Code extension does not seem to consider the installations successfull, but I cannot see any reason why this is. When I tried the option "Convert to West workspace" I am asked for the folder of my opened app (c:
ordic
cs-fund\v2.x.x\lesson2\fund_less2_exer1 in this case) and am again asked for the SDK version (selecting v2.5.0 here again) Now I get the option to "Some workspace modules are missing or incomplete and must be updated. Run West update". When I choose this it's again cloning the SDK but this time into the application directory (again 1GB) and this time everything is fine - but of course I don't want to have the SDK in every single application directory I develop/open. What could be wrong here? Looking at all the messages seen it seems as if I was not in a "West workspace" when I installed the SDKs but I can't say way, as I followed along all instructions very closely. Any idea?

daubsi · Accepted Answer

Dear Kenneth, 
 the problem is solved! But - it was not a corrupted registry value. 
 I suspect the Extension or the west command, does call "reg" exactly as shown and not as "reg.exe"? 
 Because: 
 I had a C:\Python3.10\scripts\reg.py in my search path (A Python registry parsing command from a 3rd party Python library which is in my %PATH%). Of course this command has a different usage syntax, than the Windows internal utility and thus "reg query...." failed. 
 After temporarily renaming C:\Python310 to C:\Python310_ and restarting VS Code, "reg" now correctly finds "reg.exe" and no longer the Python implementation and successfully displays the installed SDKs as expected! 
 Though the reg.py python file isn't something that a developer usually has installed, I would strongly advise to use the full command name (%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\reg.exe instead of just reg) when west checks the registry, in order to be on the safe side here. Specifying the command in full should avoid this kind of "confusion" in the future and should have no side effects. 
 Thanks for considering my suggestion for the next version and for your support! Happy the issue is now resolved!

nRF Connect SDK always fails with error "not found"

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