If your name is Jérôme, Hélène, François or Cécile, there's a good chance your Windows session — and therefore your user folder — carries an accent: C:\Users\Jérôme. Most software doesn't care. Ollama, unfortunately, can: models are stored under your user profile by default, and accented characters in that path can prevent them from loading, even though the download itself succeeded.
The symptoms
- ollama pull completes without error — the model appears to download fine.
- ollama run (or any app using Ollama) fails to load the model, or hangs.
- The error mentions the model path, a file that "cannot be found", or looks like garbled text where the accent should be.
- The same setup works flawlessly on a colleague's PC whose username has no accent.
The cause
By default, Ollama stores its models in C:\Users\<you>\.ollama\models. Somewhere along the chain that loads a model from disk, the accented character in the path gets encoded one way and decoded another (UTF-8 vs. the legacy Windows code page). The result: the software looks for a file at a path that, from its point of view, doesn't exist. This class of bug is invisible in the US — usernames there rarely carry accents — which is why it survives so long.
The 2-minute fix: move the models to an accent-free path
You don't need to rename your Windows account (please don't — that breaks other things). Ollama reads an environment variable, OLLAMA_MODELS, that tells it where to store and load models. Point it at a simple ASCII path and the problem disappears.
- 1. Create a folder at an accent-free location, e.g. C:\ollama-models.
- 2. Open "Edit environment variables for your account" (search it in the Start menu).
- 3. Add a new variable: name OLLAMA_MODELS, value C:\ollama-models.
- 4. Quit Ollama completely (system tray icon → Quit) and relaunch it.
- 5. Re-pull your model (ollama pull llama3.2 or from your app) — it now lands in the new folder and loads correctly.
Why we know this bug so well
We build Locaible, a local AI assistant for French businesses, on top of local inference. Accented Windows usernames are the single most common setup issue we see in France — so our installer detects it and applies this fix automatically. If you'd rather have local AI that just works, without the command line, that's exactly what we made Locaible for.