Any idea why Battery 4 is now encountering a major problem on startup?

StefBloke

@elseland Seems like you have a different issue to mine that manifests in similar ways. Interesting that Battery 4 runs with the dialog floating around. I didn't try that, but now you mention it, the error dialog only popped up if I ran it standalone. I did successfully have it running inside my DAW for a while but it wasn't rock steady like usual. e.g. if I browsed for a kick sample, added some stuff in the piano roll and then reopened the Battery plugin, it would reset the browser to Kits and I'd have to navigate all the way to the sample sets again. Stuff like that, and it was slow to respond to clicks. But it limped along. Most of the other apps wouldn't start though.

I really hope NI or some further diagnostics will help uncover the issue and fix it. You seem to have covered pretty much all bases already so I'm fresh out of ideas, sorry.

@Vocalpoint Thank you for your continued help. In the last few times I've let it chunter away, sfc tells me there's nothing wrong with the filesystem. DISM likewise. As you say, I'd expect nothing less, since I made a full, clean OS install last week. Since it's purely a driver issue, why would reinstalling the OS and reinstalling the same gfx drivers fix it?

What makes me smile is that the Microsoft knowledge base is full of similar advice:

Poster: My Browser has stopped working after a system update.

Answer 1: Clear its cache, delete cookies, turn your PC off and on again.

Poster: It didn't work.

Answer 2: Reinstall the browser.

Poster: It didn't work.

Answer 3: Backup all your files. Download this 5GB installer to a USB stick. Reinstall Windows. Dig out your licence key from the email sent to you 8 years ago. Install all the cumulative updates since the image was last slipstreamed, then reinstall and re-register all your apps and files. Sorry.

Turning off/on/reinstalling the OS should be a last ditch attempt only if the machine's unbootable or locked up, not a catch-all because code is hard. It doesn't fix the underlying problem of code clashes or driver/hardware incompatibility due to software updates. Or, in some cases, shoddy code with memory leaks (not in the NI case). It masks issues by resetting to a default state and yes, in most cases, knocking your house down and rebuilding it with the latest materials will indeed make it better. But in this case, given the evidence and the fact I already started fresh last week, it would be a fruitless exercise.

I came here after I failed to find a solution on the web and failed to find a path to NI tech support, in the hope someone would chime in and say "hey, yeah, I've seen this before, just tick such-and-such in the app or turn widget B on before you run app C". But it's clear now that this is very unique to my specific hardware (which, incidentally, I don't use very often compared to my daily MacBook, hence the reason it's still ancient tech and I can afford to spend a little time diagnosing things instead of hosing it back to bare metal every day or so if something crashes).

Anyway, after using this community as a rubber duck and finding the gfx DLL link (wish I'd remembered to check Event Viewer sooner), I scoured the Nvidia website, located an older driver file—I just went back as far as it would let me to v546.33—installed it, and now all my NI apps run perfectly well. Quite why, I don't know, but clearly something in a later driver changed the DLL entry points significantly enough to kill a bunch of the apps.

Not sure how far I can roll the drivers forward before it breaks, so I'll browse the release notes at my leisure and maybe try a few out to see the latest I can get to. But for now, problem solved.

Thank you for your help and putting up with my often misguided attempts to get to the bottom of what's going on.

elseland

Wow, that's crazy that rolling back the NVidia gfx driver fixed your issue. Glad your problem is solved!

Incidentally, I got help from someone at Microsoft who was able to track down the problem I had, which was indeed a different issue entirely. When the power went out, apparently my WMI Repository must have been corrupted, despite Winmgmt reporting the repository as being consistent (i.e. no errors).

What solved it for me was opening an elevated cmd prompt and running Winmgmt /resetrepository. Now everything works perfectly.

Unfortunately, it seems as though not all Native Instruments products handle errors like these appropriately. Reaktor and Battery 4 both ignored the WMI Repository error and just kept going until they crashed. I had tried many other programs without any issues, but I ran Waves Central earlier today and it did crash. Their crash gave information about the WMI Repository, which is extremely useful.

So, while a reinstall of Windows might have been quicker to get up and running with Reaktor and Battery, I doubt I would have been able to get my system set up the way I have it now. It was definitely worth the time, and I learned more about Windows and trouble-shooting potential issues. Maybe it'll help someone else in the future. This was such an easy fix once it was identified. I'm hoping someone at Native Instruments can find this info useful and patch up their software to at the very least include an error message like Waves Central does.