My beloved JabRef has been behaving strangely on the laptop: It wouldn’t launch my pdf-viewer.
After some peeking in the code (gotta love that open source thingy), I
found that it was executing a START <foo.pdf> to launch the default
viewer. So I tried doing that – and got an “access denied” error.
In the end the problem was that I have pdf’s chmoded to rw, that is, no
execute bit (this would seem reasonable in sane environments), but a
“feature” of the start command only allows it to work on files with
execute permissions.
Go figure