I actually filed a GitHub issue for this before I realized there was a form, so apologies for the duplication. Please feel free to close either this thread or the GH issue.
As reported there, I did a fresh install of Audacity 4.0.0 on a Windows 11 x64 machine, and the program simply fails to start up. The process starts up, then dies after a couple of seconds. It does produce a log file:
2026-09-07T16:49:49.709 | INFO | main_thread | GlobalModule::onPreInit | log path: C:/Users/micro/AppData/Local/Audacity/Audacity4/logs/Audacity_260907_164949.log
2026-09-07T16:49:49.710 | INFO | main_thread | GlobalModule::onPreInit | === Started Audacity 4.0.0, build: 262451524 ===
2026-09-07T16:49:49.711 | INFO | main_thread | LanguagesService::effectiveLanguageCode | System languages: QVariant(QStringList, QList("en-Latn-US", "en-US", "en-Latn", "en"))
2026-09-07T16:49:49.712 | ERROR | main_thread | LanguagesService::doLoadLanguage | Could not find resource "audacity" for language "en_US"
2026-09-07T16:49:49.713 | ERROR | main_thread | LanguagesService::loadLanguage | Failed to load language "en_US" : [21]
2026-09-07T16:49:49.760 | INFO | main_thread | DiagnosticsModule::onInit | success start crash handler
2026-09-07T16:49:49.761 | INFO | main_thread | AbstractCloudService::readTokens | Could not find the tokens file: C:/Users/micro/AppData/Local/Audacity/Audacity4/audiocom_cred.dat
2026-09-07T16:49:49.762 | ERROR | main_thread | ExtensionsLoader::manifestPaths | failed scan files, err: [401] The file does not exist
2026-09-07T16:49:49.762 | ERROR | main_thread | ExtensionsConfiguration::manifestConfigs | failed read config data, err: [406] An error occurred when reading from the file, file: C:/Users/micro/AppData/Local/Audacity/Audacity4/plugins/plugins.json
The GitHub issue indicates various things I tried. The only thing I didn’t do was uninstall Audacity version 3 on my machine.
Any advice welcome, though for now, I’m staying with v3.
Keith