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PureRef has stopped launching on my win 8.1 computer
I've tried launching just the main exe, as well as through shortcut
and loading a pureref save file
and reinstalling the program
The process handler shows no activity
I have restarted the computer several times but it's persisted over the last few days.

PureRef does work on a win10 laptop I have

Any ideas?

If you run PureRef from the cmd, do you get any additional information on why it fails to start?

You can try to remove the settings file which is located under C:/Users/<username>/AppData/Roaming/PureRef.ini and see if that helps. Please save a copy of it before removing it and if removing it helps and you are able to share it, send us the copy so we can try to fix the problem for the next version of PureRef.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-10-29 16:40 by PureRef.

cmd doesn't seem to be able to find "Start Pureref" or "Start pureref.exe" or without the "start" first
(I did reinstall it though, so the .exe is still in C:\Program Files\PureRef)
I could be messing up the cmd prompt.

Tried removing the ini file but nothing changes.

There's no process running that I can find in the task manager (for those cases where it runs but "invisible")

PureRef doesn't save error logs anywhere?

Only other thing I can think of is that I have my most used pureref file sitting on an external password protected SSD, could that mess with anything? (hasn't been a problem before) Should still be able to launch the program itself though.

Update: Upgraded to win10 thinking that might solve something, installed all the latest updates, reinstalled pureref but still the same behavior (i.e hourglass shows up for a second, a brief spike in processing but program not launching).

Edit: Tried again to run it from cmd but no info given at all



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-11-23 17:32 by Leflair.

Do you know which version of PureRef you're using? When you upgraded to Windows 10 did you re-download PureRef from our homepage or are you using the same installer you had before? It almost sounds like either something on your computer is blocking PureRef or that the actual executable is broken in some way.

Another thing you could try is to open the PureRef config file and change or add "CheckForUpdates=false". This will simplify the startup process of PureRef which might help. If it does let us know and we will look into possible causes.

I've tried both 1.9.2 and 1.9.1 and neither works. I tried reinstalling both today (only after removing the last one+settings) but it still doesn't work (it stopped working in win 8.1 and it doesn't work in win10 either).

I cannot find the PureRef config file under (C:/Users/<username>/AppData/Roaming/PureRef.ini) regardless of which version I have installed. Is there another location? The program files install location only have the .exe and uninstall.

Do you have some anti virus program? If you do maybe you can check the logs there to see if it tries to block PureRef.

I added an exclusion to Windows Defender earlier when looking for possible culprits, to prevent the antivirus from blocking pureref.

I just tried removing the exclusion and now Pureref appear to be working again. A windows mystery? Problem apparently solved.

Mysterious indeed, but glad to hear you got it working! Thanks for sharing the solution in case anyone else encounters similar problems.