When creating the handle to the in progress sentinel, it was failing because the nuget cache folder did not exist yet. Which translated to us understanding that a first time experience was already running. Now, before creating the handle, we check if the nuget folder exists, if it doesn't, we create it, instead of waiting for nuget to do that during restore.

src/Microsoft.DotNet.Configurer/NuGetCacheSentinel.cs

@@ -74,6 +74,11 @@ namespace Microsoft.DotNet.Configurer
         {
             try
             {
+                if(!Directory.Exists(NuGetCachePath))
+                {
+                    Directory.CreateDirectory(NuGetCachePath);
+                }
+
                 // open an exclusive handle to the in-progress sentinel and mark it for delete on close.
                 // we open with exclusive FileShare.None access to indicate that the operation is in progress.
                 // buffer size is minimum since we won't be reading or writing from the file.