Windows Azure Storage Emulator: The Process Cannot Access the File Because It is Being Used by Another Process

This question popped up on Stack Overflow. For the benefit of future Bing-ers, I thought I’d share the answer here too. In my experience, the error message in the title is generally the result of a port already being in use. Check which of the storage services (blobs, tables, or queues) is failing to start, and see if anything on your computer is consuming that port. The most common case is blob storage not starting because BitTorrent is using port 10000.

Quick tip, use netstat to determine which process has the port, as follows:

C:\Users\smarx>netstat -p tcp -ano | findstr :10000
  TCP    127.0.0.1:10000        0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       3672