visual studio 2010 unable to Publish to local web site. access denied

If you are able to run your application after copying from a different location, the problem is not with IIS or the worker process; it would most likely be a permissions problem with your windows user and process (in this case, visual studio).

Try running visual studio as an administrator (if you are not a local administrator of the machine). If that works, you can give full access to your inetpub folder for your user.

Late to this thread but I fixed this issue by going to:

c:\inetpub\wwwroot\myApplication > right click > properties > security > select Users(myMachine\Users) change access to full