My partner had a demo version of Musicmatch on his Windows XP computer that he had used up the last burning version on. So, I went out and bought him the full version and attempted to install it on his computer. It installs the program, but when I click on “would you like to run Musicmatch now?” it gives me the flash screen and that disappears as if the program was never running at all. I took it over to my house and installed it on my XP computer and it worked just fine. (I uninstalled afterwards of course). I also tried to install a “Hooked on Phonics”
program on both of our computers and came up with the same thing. Works on mine but not on his.
We’re both running Windows XP SP2 under the Admin logon. I’ve disabled the firewalls and anti-virus too on his and that didn’t change these results. Any ideas?
Longshots:
1 - Does the “Program Files” directory have any weird permissions on it? Admin should get you around most of this, but something like “write but not execute” gives you behavior like this.
2 - Run a checkdisk (either chkdsk from the command line or “Check this disk for errors” from the tools option of disk properties).
3 - Reboot, if you haven’t already.
4 - Open the task manager and see if the programs say they’re running or not after you attempt to launch them. If they do, is it possible they think they’re running either: a) minimized to the task bar or tray, or b) on a second monitor that doesn’t actually exist?
5 - Clean out the temporary files directory and re-install. To find it, type %TMP% and %TEMP% into the Start->Run… prompt. Try both, they don’t always point to the same place (and either of them may not exist at all).
6 - Start in safe mode, and see if the applications run there. If they do, you can start the long, slow process of “msconfig” tinkering to find out what the culprit is.
All of these are shots in the dark, that problem’s really weird.
Perhaps you have a corrupted .dll file. Run SFC /Scannow and put your Windows CD in when called for. Let run until it finishes. Then try to run your program.