I made a fresh install of Windows 7 on a new SSD for my lappy, and now a fresh install of 1.8.6 won’t start up. It brings up the usual starting window, but its just the chromed box, no content at all. It just sits there looking like its working at something, but if you interfere with it in any way it just goes into “not responding” status. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling a few times, including digging into the app data and manually removing the appropriate folders, but nothing seems to change this behavior. Anybody have any clue what’s going wronge here?
okay then …
So I kept banging away on the problem and started working backward through recently installed applications and found that Scrivener seems to have been tussling with (and losing to) a very recent install of LibreOffice. Removing that allowed Scrivener to fire right up. Glad I got a solution, but skeptical that its a good thing that Scrivener and one of the leading alternative office suites don’t get along. I personally don’t care, as I found LO to be of very little utility over just going with Office 2010 which I own, buuut it might be something you’ll want to look into going forward.
Of course, now that I say that, the universe takes it as a challenge, and now Scrivener won’t load again, though now, instead of not responding at an empty New Project box, its not responding with an entire empty Project screen.
Anyone? Anyone? Something DEE OH OH application use. Voodoo Application Use …
Does sound like a conflict between programs (or with libraries accessed by the programs), so I’d check on programs that start automatically as part of logging in on Windows. You may just need to whitelist Scrivener in your security program. You can use msconfig to disable your startup items and reboot, then see if Scrivener launches properly. If it works, you can start adding back programs in batches and retesting until you narrow down to the one that is causing trouble. If it’s something like a backup program or security software, you can probably set it to exclude Scrivener and allow the programs to run together peaceably.
Not really finding anything. Like I said, its a fresh install of Windows 7, so other than trying out LibreOffice (and hating it) the other day, there is actually less on the machine now than there ever has been, and certainly nothing new. Normally I’m stubborn enough to make this sort of thing work, eventually, but nothing I’ve done checking through my startups or shutting down MS Security Essentials has resulted in any change, so I’m pretty much at the point of giving up.
You might try running Scrivener in compatibility mode, choosing Win 7 as the OS to use. Right-click the Scrivener.exe and choose Properties to access the compatibility settings. It seems odd to set the same OS as you’re using, but it seems to get around some issues with OS updates or other quirks. I’ve seen a handful of other reports with startup problems resolved by switching to compatibility mode.
That seems to have done it. Thanks Jen 