Startup & Installation Issues
Diagnosing launch failures, installation problems and rendering issues
Double-clicking the desktop icon does nothing
Symptom: no window appears, and repeated clicks still show nothing.
Cause: closing the window sends the app to the tray, so the process is still alive; a second instance is blocked by the single-instance mutex while the first cannot raise its main window.
Resolution: look for the app icon in the tray (including the overflow area) and click it. If that fails, launch once with --takeover, which ends the existing instance that cannot present a visible main window.
The installer says the system is not supported
Symptom: the installer reports the OS version is too low and aborts.
Cause: below Windows 7 SP1. .NET 6 requires SP1 on Windows 7, a hard floor.
Resolution: install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and retry; or use the web site, which has the same features and no OS constraint.
The installer says the app is running
Symptom: a dialog reports the application is running during installation.
Cause: the previous version's process is still alive (closing the window sends it to the tray).
Resolution: confirm the prompt. The installer first closes it politely (taskkill), then force-kills if needed. The app holds no unsaved state and saves settings immediately, so a kill loses nothing; it is relaunched after installation.
No desktop shortcut after installing
Symptom: no app icon on the desktop after installation.
Cause: the "create desktop shortcut" task was unchecked during installation; or during an upgrade the user had previously removed the icon, so the installer preserves the current state rather than recreating it.
Resolution: rerun the installer and check "create desktop shortcut"; or create one from the Start menu.
Garbled or missing UI after launch
Symptom: the main UI is garbled, shows colour blocks, or does not appear.
Cause: the graphics driver is incompatible with D3D11 / OpenGL and the automatic fallback chain cannot recover.
Resolution: launch with --software-render to force software rendering. It is slower, but the UI appears. The parameter is recognised by release builds too.
Random grey rectangles on screen
Symptom: animation-heavy pages such as the drawing page show randomly positioned pale grey rectangles whose shape changes every frame.
Cause: old Windows 7 graphics drivers cannot reliably preserve the previous frame on the render surface, so unredrawn areas expose stale pixels.
Resolution: on Windows 7 the app defaults to software rendering, which makes this impossible by construction. If it still occurs, pass --software-render explicitly.
Startup is slow
Symptom: several seconds pass before the main window appears.
Cause: .NET runtime loading and assembly JIT dominate. Measured: ~6.4s from process start to the main window, ~4.4s of which is runtime loading and JIT.
Resolution: expected. Release builds enable ReadyToRun to shorten this. On old machines, disabling unnecessary startup items helps further.
Command-line switches for diagnosis
| Switch | Effect |
|---|---|
--software-render | Force software rendering |
--gpu-render | Allow the GPU fallback chain |
--takeover | On single-instance conflict, end the instance that cannot present a visible main window |
--simulate-win7 | Force the Windows 7 code path (development machines) |
Contributors
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Copyright
Copyright Ownership:ClassSoftwareHub
License under:GPL-3.0