So I recently found, due to corporate IT policy, my local admin/elevated privileges had been removed, and therefore I was unable to run Acquia Dev Desktop.
After having corporate IT support enter their administrative credentials, i found my local Drupal site was displaying the “Install Drupal” screen, rather than my local website. This screen is usually displayed when the local database is empty, but after checking my PHPMyAdmin, i could see this was not the case.
Maybe the new username account used to launch Dev Desktop didnt have permission to access the database, or could even see it? Correct, here’s my solution:
I copied this file:
C:\Users\My_Username\.acquia\DevDesktop\DrupalSettings\loc_[sitename]_dd.inc
…to the folder for the new user who has permission to launch DevDesktop:
C:\Users\New_User\.acquia\DevDesktop\DrupalSettings\loc_[sitename]_dd.inc
(The above folder was previously empty)
And, BOOM, now the local Drupal site runs successfully.