LookupError('unknown encoding: utf-16-le') on Windows 11 with Anaconda3-2024.06-1-Windows-x86_64.exe

Feedback Bugs & Issues
1

When performing a complete uninstall of my anaconda installation (update via interface didn’t work) and re-install using Anaconda3-2024.06-1-Windows-x86_64.exe (SHA256:45EEF9132B70E3D5A493C26429DDB4E2C9278A32097FD4BC729F860685633A3B) , I get the error below when doing something simple like conda install -c conda-forge mamba

ERROR conda.core.link:_execute(950): An error occurred while installing package ‘conda-forge::fmt-10.2.1-h181d51b_0’.
Rolling back transaction: done

LookupError('unknown encoding: utf-16-le')
()
[Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'F:\\Users\\luc\\ana3\\conda-meta\\ca-certificates-2024.3.11-haa95532_0.json'
[Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'F:\\Users\\luc\\ana3\\conda-meta\\certifi-2024.6.2-py312haa95532_0.json'
[Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'F:\\Users\\luc\\ana3\\conda-meta\\conda-24.5.0-py312haa95532_0.json'

I tried many things such as setting the environment variable to utf-8, but that didn’t help.

PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8
PYTHONUTF8=1

The only thing that worked so far is again uninstalling everything, deleting the .conda and .anaconda folder in my user folder (C:\Users<username>) and starting from an older version of the anaconda installation file (Anaconda3-2024.02-1-Windows-x86_64.exe; SHA256: 087C633E355BC709222AD9E0DBAD77ABEED84F7E06DBDBECAE84BA8B3660429E) and perform the upgrades via the GUI to the latest version.

Did other people experience this, what causes this and how was it solved?

Thanks for your feedback,

Luc

2

Hi Luc, if it still matters: I ran into the same problem and solved it in a dirtier way. The cause of it, in my case, seemed to be an update of openssl to 3.4.1 on Windows 11, producing the error message:

ERROR conda.core.link:_execute(938): An error occurred while installing package ‘conda-forge::openssl-3.4.1-ha4e3fda_0’.

If you ignore this dependency using the --no-deps argument in conda, it may install and work with the default 3.0.16.