See #61 for details on some of the issues.

Tip 1:

Use CMD. It annoys me at least as much as it annoys others, but it seems to cause the fewest non-reproducible random errors.

Issue 2:

Permissions errors.

Always use an elevated CMD session.
npm uses native Windows NTFS symlinks, which require administrative permissions to work with as far as I have been able to learn about and use them.
npm also creates/copies binaries to node_modules/.bin with special permissions that require administrative access to copy, and this project copies them when running builds, debugging the project, and packaging the Desktop app (at a minimum, just what I've seen working with the project thus far).

Tip 2:

A number of non-reproducible transitive issues can be corrected by running in pwsh or PowerShell in the Colanode project root:

gci -Recurse -Filter node_modules -Directory | rm -Recurse
rm .\package-lock.json

This is a lot faster than deleting it in Explorer.

Then in the administrative CMD session:

npm i

Tip 3:

npm on Windows is a lot slower than in WSL2 or a bare metal or virtual Linux box because of a number of reasons... see here. Mostly NTFS and OS hooks.

Patience.

Tip 4:

I usually run git clean -fidX when I pull a new version.
It helps to make sure I rebuild from a clean slate when I pull updates from this repository.