Audacity Forum

Don't know if this has been posted before, so forgive me if I am repeating a question. I searched for all the key words I could think of and didn't find a problem like mine. I am using Audacity 1.3 beta in Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. I am running it in Windows 98 Service Pack 3 compatibility mode. It was working fine until yesterday. Now when I double click the shortcut for Audacity on my desktop, the program starts, but I don't see a window. The Audacity button is there on my taskbar. But if I click it, nothing comes up. I can right-click it and pin it to the taskbar, as if the window was open, but it is not there. If I hover my mouse over the button a little pop-up windows appears, showing the Audacity windows, but when I click it nothing happens. I have used alt-tab to scroll through the various windows that are open and I select Audacity, but again, the actual window does not show up. I can even right-click an mp3 file and open it Audacity, and I see a little "processing" box. But as soon as the progress bar is finished, it disappears and no window. Then when I close the button on the taskbar, it asks if I want to save. Everything acts like Audacity is working, with the exception of no window actually appearing that I can edit mp3s in. Any advice?

mista_grimm wrote:I am running it in Windows 98 Service Pack 3 compatibility mode.

You've taken compatibility mode back too far.
You should first try running Audacity without compatibility mode but just as a 32-bit application. If you get the error "Runtime Error Program:(location) R6034" change compatibility mode to Vista SP2 or XP SP3.

The actual problem is probably due to corruption in the audacity.cfg file. This file stores Audacity settings, including the window position, which at present sounds as if it is off-screen somewhere.
To reset the audacity.cfg file you first need to ensure that Audacity is closed, then locate the audacity.cfg file.
By default it is in:
Users<user name>AppDataRoamingAudacity

Open the file in Notepad and delete everything except for the line:
NewPrefsInitialized=1
then save the file.

Thanks for your reply Steve. Editing the audacity.cfg file did the trick! I am not sure how to run Audacity in 32-bit mode, unless that is running it with no compatibility settings enabled. I tried it that way and I get an error message saying something like "There is already one instance of Audacity running..." And I get that message even if it is the only instance of Audacity running. So I went with the Vista SP2 compatibility mode like you suggested and it seems to be working fine. Thanks again for your help!