can't launch or uninstall on Windows 8.1 Pro 64

[goonie]

Hi guys,

I have been tinkiring with my spotify desltop app for a couple of days now but it seem there's really anymore I can do to make it work again.

Basically when launching the program I get the spinning circle for few seconds than everything stalls and the player never show up.

The "Spotify 32bit" process is up and running and if I try to launch the player multiple time multiple process will start but still no player running.

Even killing all related process and try to uninstall give the same results: spinning blue wheel and the uninstaller doesn't start at all...

So far the only way I managed to make Spotify work again is a clean reinstall, which means throwing away everything manually since as mentioned before the unistaller stalls too, cleaning the registry restart, reinstall and then it works...but only until you shut down the PC...the next time it will start all over again same sympthoms... 😞

The thing is that it used to work like a charm and all this nonsense started randomly right after I did some shortcuts rearranging on the desktop..I mean just deleting some and recreating the Spotify one too. Of course I tried to launch the player directly from the .exe but doesn't change anything. And anyway I tink that could hardly have anything to do with the malfunctioning...

It's not like the program crashes, it seem more like it just get endlessly stuck in the launch routine...any ideas?

I mean I like the web player and everything but...I'm a premium subscriber and I wuld like my desktop player back.. 😛

[Peter__ · Accepted solution]

Can you start Spotify from the command line and see if any errors get logged?

C:\Users\<your user>\AppData\Roaming\Spotify\spotify.exe -c

[goonie]

Now that's interesting...starting Spotify from the command line, finally made the player work again...it kind of crashed once then started again and now it seem to work 🙂

By the way I had a couple of red lines in the log, one about "XML_sax_parser_expat.ccp:667 no element found at line 1 column 0" and another one wich regards playlist about "deadlock" etc though I guess that is unrelated to the previous problem since shows up after the player is up and running.

...whatever happened it seem that the console launch unjammed the whole thing.

For the record I uninstalled and reinstalled the player, checked the log again..those two errors are still there but it seems they are not relevant. So I don't now what happened before anyaway..thanks for the magic!

[heliobentzen]

Same trouble here and this command not resolve to me.

[goonie]

Hey Helio

I've been dealing with this issues for months, I even went through Spotify tech support too without any luck. As far as I can tell this is some sort of bug affecting a minority of users hence until it doesn't escalate up to more meaningful numbers it will be hardly fixed. I'm saying this because I've been experiencing on more than one Windows 8.1 PCs even with different accounts.

If you want my 2 cents these are some tips to make your coexistence with such problems a bit more bereable:

- set Spotify to launch at startup with Windows..for some reason at least for me (again tested on more than one PC hence I would say is a quite consistent workaround) when the app starts automatically seem to work. And anyway given the speed of windows 8 startup is quicker to restart the system than go through the suggestion I'll give you next. Again in my experience if for some reason Spotify do not fire up by itself as accordingly set in the preferences, just restart Windows twice and it will work. Magic.

- If the above trick do not work to me the only solution is to kill all Spotify related process from the task manager, delete all Spotify folders manully dragging them in the bin (uninstaller will not work, same way as the launcher...the process remain stuck in the background no matter what). Then do a quick registry wipe (I use Wise Registry Cleaner google it, safe and reliable app). Restart the PC, reinstall Spotify from scratch...and set it to fire up automatically with the OS. Hopefully for some days if not weeks based on you luck, stars alignment and black magic it will work smooth as butter. Then after a while you will end up doing all over again... 😞