Pear Upgrade: Security Error Fix

This was an issue I had for just about a week. I am kinda new to the idea of doing regression tests on all of a project's codebase, but the tools I was going to be using were easily installable via PEAR. Setting up the development environment was quite a task and because of this, I found myself installing and re-installing software multiple times so that the settings would be correct. I'm not sure if this was the reason for this issue none the less, after a few re-installs of PEAR, I started getting the following error when I attempted to upgrade:

Error getting channel info from pear.phpunit.de: SECURITY ERROR: Will not write to C:\Users\DTHOMP~1\AppData\Local\Temp\pear\cache\4ab1bc7c
67cfd409719746ffb3d29a21rest.cacheid as it is symlinked to C:\Users\dthompson\AppData\Local\Temp\pear\cache\4ab1bc7c67cfd409719746ffb3d29a2
1rest.cacheid - Possible symlink attack

Very simply put, the solution was to locate the pear cache folder and delete all of it's contents. Once I did that, I was able to run pear upgrade without any issues.

A few things to consider:

1. PHP Unit was the package that I installed before getting the upgrade errors.

2. This was running on a Windows 7 box