Vs 2018 suddenly not starting

[Davidk]

A student reports that her VS 2018 - in use Ok late last friday - would not start on Saturday morning. The splash ad screen appeared, and just did not go away. Repeat attempts got the same result. PC system is running win10.

Has anyone had the same recent experience?
Any suggestions as to cause? How to get it started?

[lata]

Hi David

Some thoughts
The program may be corrupt, a problem with the library.
Not accessing the internet, maybe trying to check for updates, not sure but could slow start.

Turn of internet and try starting the program.
Try resetting the program by renaming the 21.0 folder, if it now starts then I would suspect a corrupt library?

[RobertOZ]

Also make sure that Video Studio is not running in Task Manager, Many times I have closed VS then been unable to open again, it would appear that (well as far as my desktop is concerned) VS does not close properly and it is necessary to kill the process in Task Manager

[chubtor]

I have had exactly that same problem just a few days ago. I installed 2018 Ultimate about 2 months ago, used it a few times to try it out then left it and when next I tried it failed to start. In the end I uninstalled it, ran CCleaner Registry section then reinstalled. Since then it has been fine.

[Davidk]

I made a number of suggestions to student about remedying this issue, and she has reported back. One of them involved a cold start, and the rest of this post is about that.

I surmise (am not positive) from her feedback that she is one of those who leave their computers running continuously. A historic thing originally aimed at improved reliability of PC parts, and a convenience factor - the re-start time is avoided. But these days, the various components that make up a PC are so reliable now that this practice generally is not necessary, and in terms of re-start, win8 onwards made serious in-roads into minimising that.
But leaving a PC on continuously makes it a candidate for accumulated memory leaks to impact performance: apps (including parts of windows) are assigned working memory from a pool when they open, and are supposed to release that working memory back to the pool when they close: but some don't, or don't do it correctly (thus the available pool 'leaks'). In this condition the pool memory available becomes progressively smaller until some software won't work. Not as frequent (?? hard to tell) as it used to be, as since it was first identified better programming practice has reduced it a lot. But still around apparently. The temporary fix any user can apply to remedy a possible memory leak issue is to periodically cold boot the machine, start again from scratch. An overnight shutdown should be all that's necessary for that.

And that's what student did, and it worked: after next cold start, VS opened normally.

[asik1]

** I shut down every evening for many years, since I stopped "emule-ing".
I found that electricity bill went down by more than 15$ a month.