JIRA fails to startup after first restart?

Every time I installed JIRA on one of my windows machines it just worked fine until the first restart. When booting up JIRA for the second time it fails showing up a JIRALockedError.

Diving into the file system resolves the problem. When JIRA starts up its locking for a file called .jira-home.lock in %ProgramFiles%\Atlassian\Application Data\JIRA folder to check if there is a second instance is running and using the files. If not it creates the file and proceeds to get executed. But naturally there is no second JIRA instance running on my machine, so why this error occure?

JIRA lacks of permissions to the database folder.

Windows 7 does not allow the current user and of course not an application to perform modifications within the %ProgramFiles% directories even if they belong to the application itself. So JIRA can not create the .jira-home.lock file an assumes that the directory is locked by an other instance.

So JIRA must be allowed to be able to create this file. To achieve this it needs Modify permission at least for the folder %ProgramFiles%\Atlassian\Application Data\JIRA. But if you startup JIRA again (and using the default in-memory database) it will stop working again because of another error. Thats because JIRA needs permissions for an additional folder containing the database stuff.

Finally the easiest way to get JIRA running is to grant Full Control for the MACHINE\Users group to the %ProgramFiles%\Atlassian folder. You should do this only for trial purposes.