Audacity crashes on startup

[fredriley]

I've used Audacity successfully in the past, and I recommend its use to my colleagues for editing podcasts. Lately, though, I've been unable to get it to work on my machine - it simply crashes on startup, even before the splash screen, and I get the usual Microsoft 'tell us about the error' message box. I de- then re-installed the latest stable version (1.2.6) and the problem recurs. I'm using Win XP with SP2 and all my other apps work fine (or as fine as they can within Microsoft's crashware OS). I've attached a screenshot of the crash data window (it doesn't allow data selection and copying, and the dump file it refers to doesn't exist).

Does this ring a bell with anyone? I suspect it's local to my machine as I've not heard crash reports from my colleagues but I've not had time to do test installs on other machines. No big, I've got other editors on my machine which I can use, but if this is a known problem I could do with knowing the fix for my colleagues' sake.

Cheers

Fred

[steve]

I de- then re-installed the latest stable version (1.2.6)

Audacity 1.2.6 was the stable version but the developers abandoned it years ago.
Audacity 1.3.12 is the current version and I use it extensively on Windows XP. I'd highly recommend it. http://audacityteam.org/download/
With a bit of luck upgrading will solve the problem, but do write back to let us know either way.