MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Sigil won't start on new Windows 10 laptop

Marg1780 · 05-23-2021, 08:32 PM

Hello,

I've just finished setting up a new laptop (Acer, running Windows 10), and was looking forward to a nice evening playing with some ePub files I've been editing, but when I tried to open one, Sigil refuses to start. Now according to my installation notes, I did fire it up right after installation, and it seemed to be working, but now... nothing visible. It does recognize which ePubs I clicked on - they show up as "recently opened" if I right-click on the taskbar icon, but they don't actually appear on the screen. There are no displayed errors and no "phantom" copies of the app showing in the task manager.

I did install several other apps after Sigil, but I can't find any seemingly relevant discussions about unfortunate interactions. I've been using Sigil for years, on at least 4 different laptops, and previously it has always co-existed with the same group of apps without problems. I haven't installed anything that wasn't on my old laptop, and both laptops are up-to-date with Windows 10 so the OS itself should be within a patch or two of being identical.

I did install a more recent version of Calibre on this laptop (5.17) and had trouble installing some of its plug-ins which turned out to be because Calibre is now using a different installation of Python, but I believe that would have no effect on the app world outside of Calibre itself. (I'm not computer illiterate but I am 100% Python illiterate.) Anyway, Calibre was installed, set-up and tested prior to installing Sigil, and is working as it should.

Previously Sigil hasn't played up on me at all, so I've had no experience attempting to debug issues, especially the ones that show no external symptoms as a starting place.

I found mention on another thread of going into the AppData\Local\sigil-ebook\sigil folder, renaming sigil.ini and trying to start it again. It still doesn't come up, and it does NOT create a new copy of sigil.ini, so it's failing prior to reaching that functional step.

I'm not running the current version but it is the same version that was running perfectly on my old laptop, installed there from the same file. I did not port over any modified preferences files, just started from the out-of-the-box version. (I found a discussion of incompatibilities in the ini files on github.)

And at this point I'm out of ideas, and any suggestions would be welcome. On my old system, Sigil was certainly the single app I use most frequently, so I'm really desperate to get it working again.

05-23-2021, 08:32 PM	#1
Marg1780 Enthusiast Posts: 29 Karma: 10 Join Date: Nov 2018 Location: Ontario, Canada Device: Kobo Clara	Sigil won't start on new Windows 10 laptop Hello, I've just finished setting up a new laptop (Acer, running Windows 10), and was looking forward to a nice evening playing with some ePub files I've been editing, but when I tried to open one, Sigil refuses to start. Now according to my installation notes, I did fire it up right after installation, and it seemed to be working, but now... nothing visible. It does recognize which ePubs I clicked on - they show up as "recently opened" if I right-click on the taskbar icon, but they don't actually appear on the screen. There are no displayed errors and no "phantom" copies of the app showing in the task manager. I did install several other apps after Sigil, but I can't find any seemingly relevant discussions about unfortunate interactions. I've been using Sigil for years, on at least 4 different laptops, and previously it has always co-existed with the same group of apps without problems. I haven't installed anything that wasn't on my old laptop, and both laptops are up-to-date with Windows 10 so the OS itself should be within a patch or two of being identical. I did install a more recent version of Calibre on this laptop (5.17) and had trouble installing some of its plug-ins which turned out to be because Calibre is now using a different installation of Python, but I believe that would have no effect on the app world outside of Calibre itself. (I'm not computer illiterate but I am 100% Python illiterate.) Anyway, Calibre was installed, set-up and tested prior to installing Sigil, and is working as it should. Previously Sigil hasn't played up on me at all, so I've had no experience attempting to debug issues, especially the ones that show no external symptoms as a starting place. I found mention on another thread of going into the AppData\Local\sigil-ebook\sigil folder, renaming sigil.ini and trying to start it again. It still doesn't come up, and it does NOT create a new copy of sigil.ini, so it's failing prior to reaching that functional step. I'm not running the current version but it is the same version that was running perfectly on my old laptop, installed there from the same file. I did not port over any modified preferences files, just started from the out-of-the-box version. (I found a discussion of incompatibilities in the ini files on github.) And at this point I'm out of ideas, and any suggestions would be welcome. On my old system, Sigil was certainly the single app I use most frequently, so I'm really desperate to get it working again.