@AndrewB As far as I can see there was no comment prior to your comment requesting that he echo the variable. So "won't" is the wrong term, that implies someone suggested additional troubleshooting and he refused to do so, which was not the case at all as far as I can see.

Sometimes I think these questions are misinterpreted. The asker may not expect you to solve their problem for them, or hold their hand with a back and forth "now do this, what do you see"? But instead just some troubleshooting pointers are often appreciated. "E.g. that error could be caused by many things, check your Event Logs, and also run sysinternals process monitor to see if there are file access errors that indicate permissions problem" I've seen some broad questions, but the asker only expected broad answer to point them in right direction and they were happy with that.