Announcements
The Spotify Stars Program: Celebrating Values Week!

Help Wizard

Step 1

NEXT STEP

Spotify is already running, but not responding. Please close it and try again.

Solved!

Spotify is already running, but not responding. Please close it and try again.

I keep getting this "already running" message when I try to open spotify.  It is listed as a process in Windows Task Manager, but it won't close when I try to force end the process.  I've been having this same issue many times over the past month.

 

Any ideas how to actually end the process, or better yet, keep it from doing this altogether?

Reply
141 Replies

mine is doing the same, i have tried eerything a million times and paying 9.99 per month!!!! help

 

Can you tell us your version of OS?

I right clicked on the icon shortcut on my screen, then I hit "run as administrator"....allow it to make changes or whatever to computer..? YES....and voila it popped up! Try it.   btw I have Windows 7

I don't know if by now the problem has been fixed, but it's 2013 and this happened to me. If I follow your steps will I be able to have my internet on sharing ever again?

I've been having this problem for the last few weeks on a Windows 7 64 bit machine.    I can't kill the spotify.exe process (I do have admin rights), and when I try to run spotify I get the "already running" message.  

 

It seems possible to me that it gets into this state after the machine has hibernated and is then awakened.  I'll try to verify this.

 

OTOH, this seems like a signifcant and not uncommon problem, and I would hope Spotify is looking to reproduce it independently of my efforts ....

 

 

great... for windows 8 users

+1, Same problems on Windows 8, I can't kill spotify.exe process or process tree and it doesn't want to start and says it's already launched....

Spotify is out of order until I reboot the system...

Help, we're paying for a service and the problem was first encountered for 1 year by users over here and on others communities...

Marked as solution


@lhebas wrote:

+1, Same problems on Windows 8, I can't kill spotify.exe process or process tree and it doesn't want to start and says it's already launched....

Spotify is out of order until I reboot the system...

Help, we're paying for a service and the problem was first encountered for 1 year by users over here and on others communities...


Have you tried disabling Internet Connection Sharing? 

I would suggest the other fixes and work arounds in this topic too.

 

Peter

Peter
Spotify Community Mentor and Troubleshooter

Spotify Last.FM Twitter LinkedIn Meet Peter Rock Star Jam 2014


If this post was helpful, please add kudos below!

Happens to me too. Everytime I come back from sleep. S3 sleep, Windows 7 x64. Spotify plays for a few seconds then freezes. It will be unresponsive for as long as I let it remain that way, hours even. Once I close it, it remains running as a task and I'm unable to kill it. I've tried reinstalling and clearning my app data. I don't have interenet connection sharing enabled.

I collected a dump for the crashed spotify exe. I checked out the dump file, but it's not much use without the symbols. Anyway, spotify seems to be stuck in its own close routine:

 

ntdll!ZwClose+0xa

 

+0xa is the memory offset I'd need symbols for. I doubt spotify has symbols available, so I can send the dump file to a QA person if they're actually interested in resolving this issue and want more information. Since this happens to me everytime my computer wakes from sleep, it's easy to collect data.

I do that too.   I think this problem occurs when my machine recovers from hibernating.  So now when I stop using Spotify, I explicitly close it and that seems to make a difference.   

 

I suggest the Spotify development team try to duplicate this by sleeping a laptop and resuming it (Win 7 Pro).

I am unable to duplicate this on my Windows 7 and 8 laptops, which is weird. Spotify resumes play as normal from sleep and hibernation. 

 

Peter

Peter
Spotify Community Mentor and Troubleshooter

Spotify Last.FM Twitter LinkedIn Meet Peter Rock Star Jam 2014


If this post was helpful, please add kudos below!

Reply for the solution;
I tried to reboot my pc two times now, but i am still getting this problem. The computer is almost new, and rebooted twice - just don't understand it?

I read, that you can open your Commandpromt to kill the task, with typeing  taskkill /im spotify.exe /f

Maybe it can help closing the task?

Not for me. I've tried force closing (the /f command switch in your suggestion). It's no use, the process will not die.

 taskkill /im spotify.exe /f--

not recognised as either an internal or external command on my pc running XP

Man shot for that! You hit the nail right on the head for me! -- Tried the manual Ad-Hoc with Windows 8 last night and all this **bleep** started happening to my spotify, did what you said and boom back to good music! You have my Kudos mate.

Spotify constantly hangs itself up to a frequency that it has become entirely unusable.

Windows 8 64bit, Spotify-premium

 

Right at the very start of booting spotify, it freezes while connecting to the network. I can't even play a song, yet browse for artists without having it hang itself up completely.

 

great! So the only choice I have now is to reinstall it. However, it appears that I can't even do that without going into Windows-safe-mode and delete everything manually, and also cleaning the registry. I have to go into safe-mode since deleting the AppData manually doesn't work since apparantely spotify is "currently being used".

 

Well, even after rebooting my PC and deleting every-single trace of spotify from my harddrive, it still freezes before even playing a single song.

 

It doesn't make sense and frankly annoys me to hell. It also happened after I payed for my premium-membership. Well, needless to say, I won't do the mistake again of giving money to something that doesn't work.

I'm guessing this still isn't fixed since I've been having the same problems all week. Windows 7( 64 bit). The taskkill command isn't working, task manager...Just a reboot will get it working again.

Solution:

 

  • Open Task Manager
  • In Win8 go to the details tab in win7 stay in the first tab.
  • Find Spotify.
  • Right click >> End Process Tree
  • Then right click on a few svchost.exe and end those processes trees. Try the ones with the  "LOCAL SERVICE " username first.
  • This may cause a few Windows services to crash and restart but its ok. Windows will automatically refresh svchost and those services will reopen instantly.
  • Open Spotify

 

 

From what I can gather from the crash messages, it seems to be when the computer goes to sleep/hibernate/whatever and the sound device disappears. When it comes back, spotify is still attached to the device from before it goes to sleep and can't close the hook (because the device doesn't exist).

 

Solution for me was to just disable all the sleep/hibernate power managment bollocks.

Suggested posts