The Problem
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 under Windows through WSL. I installed Docker for Windows so as to be able to run an old MySQL, because I was told I need docker in WSL to talk to Windows Docker if I want docker working in WSL1. I restarted my computer to finish the docker installation and, upon reboot, Ubuntu was no longer accessible. I get the rather opaque error "Access is Denied" when I try to open a WSL shell.
I tried to figure out how to fix this error for a while - one site recommended restarting LxxsManager, among other things. None of them worked, so I decided to install another WSL distro, this time Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (I'm not sure which version the one called just "Ubuntu" is, but that's what I was running before).
A day passed, in which I set back up my development environment and rebuilt a bunch of software in WSL. I then tried to run docker, which involved installing docker in WSL and connecting it to Docker for Windows. Docker for Windows was refusing to run because I was not in the docker-users group, so I added myself to that group and logged out and back in for the changes to take effect.
Unfortunately, when I logged back in, I was no longer able to access WSL - the "Access is Denied" error had returned.
Context
I am running Windows 10, Version 1909 (Build 18363.836). My user is not an administrator, but I have a local user account that is an administrator that I can run commands as. There seem to be 2 LxxsManager services running, one of them belonging to my user and one to the system(?).
What I want help with
All I wanted was to run MySQL 5.7 on modern Ubuntu, but now I've re-set-up my entire linux system and I don't want to have to do it again.
I would be interested in advice on how to get back into my WSL system. I spent most of today installing things to get it working. I would also be interested in advice on how to debug this, since I'm not terribly familiar with the inner workings of Windows.
