Can't launch anything

[Skyfighter]

So I've been playing this game a fair bit lately, gotten to around turn 80-90 of my campaign, no problem after I installed it the first time. I was even playing it yesterday without any trouble, but then I try to start it up today and it hasn't been pretty.

I have Vista and I'm using the game through Steam, and for some reason the game's launcher has absolutely wigged out, whether I'm using the default one or that custom one I've seen going around. In the case of the vanilla one, when I hit play I see "Play Medieval II" or whatever, which is fine, but under that I see duplicates of everything all out of order, something like "Americas, Stainless Steel, Britannia, Americas, Teutonic, Britannia, Stainless Steel, Teutonic." The best part is that irregardless of which one I click on all it'll do is launch the launcher a second time, and then when I click on something in that launcher it'll tell me that Steam "failed to start game, app already running." I checked before I hit anything on the second launcher, there's only one copy of it in my processes, so I don't know what that's all about.

So I've been fiddling with it for hours. I've tried to verify the caches on Kingdoms and Vanilla, reinstalled Stainless Steel cleanly, Reinstalled both vanilla and Kingdoms cleanly, restarted my computer several times, deleted the Medieval II folder entirely, ran both ccleaner and Wise Registry Cleaner, reinstalled Medieval II, and all for nothing. Before I wiped the slate clean as best I could, nothing would even happen when I clicked on Stainless Steel. The cursor would say it was working for half a second but quite literally nothing would happen, it wouldn't even show up in the processes. Right now all I have is Vanilla Medieval II and that's not acting too weird except that I'm getting 'app already running' even on that, and it might think I still have Stainless Steel on my computer. If I have to go and manually get rid of some files in the registry or something, that's a subject I have little knowledge of and I didn't see much on the subject of how to go about that. I've dabbled in the registry before, but only when I had explicit instructions to follow, I'm not about to break my computer worse than it already is.

I'm basically stumped and pretty frustrated. I've tried everything I could think of and followed what advice I saw and I promise you if there was a solution that a simple Google search would have uncovered, I nearly think that I would've found it by now. Coming to a forum like this is usually my last resort because I don't want to waste anybody's time but I don't think this is something I can fix myself. I've been hitting my head against this for 10 hours now. Any help anyone can give me would be most appreciated.

[Skyfighter]

Well, I fiddled around with it some more, did a few things like un-check 'read-only' on the Medieval II folder's properties, deleted Steam's appcache folder, and ran ccleaner again. I shut down Steam and tried to launch the game from the M2 folder directly (which is how I usually do it, I just usually have Steam running at the time). It booted Steam up, like it does, I got a dangerous file alert for the launcher from AVG which I told it to ignore, and the game booted up but crashed because of some fatal graphics error. I started to game again, and it starts without any trouble from anything now, I've shut it down and opened it a few times with not even a hiccup. I'm glad it's working, but I feel like it's less because of me fixing the problem and more because my computer is messing with me. I'm going to install Kingdoms and SS and hope that it keeps on working.

[Skyfighter]

Medieval II vanilla still works, but Stainless Steel doesn't. With both 6.3 and 6.4, clicking on the SS launcher does nothing except now it shows up in the processes for a second before disappearing. When I try to start it through the MII launcher it launches as Medieval II on the task bar and shows the MII loading screen and stays there, seemingly indefinitely, while reading 'not responding' in the task manager until I hit the end task button. Uninstalling and reinstalling does nothing to help me. Yeah I'm at my wit's end so I'm going to walk away from this for a while. My computer's just like "oh, you want to play one of your favorite games? Too bad, you get to spend most of your weekend trying to work out what's wrong with it instead." I'm going to go work on some papers or play Terraria or something, if anyone replies to this within a few hours you will make me very happy.

[Skyfighter]

So, turns out that all I probably needed to do was install everything outside of Program Files. For the benefit of someone else having this problem, just cut and paste -only- the steamapps folder and steam.exe somewhere else, launch steam and it'll download all the Steam related files for you (so you might want to delete the old folder you had steam in), reinstall M2 and SS, and go. I guess an admin can close this or something, if they really want to.

[z3p]

I've got a pretty similar problem to this.I had SS6.4 running fine with steam, but a few days ago (after a steam update) both the SS launcher and the SS setup.exe stopped being able to start the game. There's no error, and the game doesn't even begin to start. I tried the trick with renaming the SS folder as one of the Kingdoms expansion folders, but the same thing would happen through the medieval launcher.UAC has always been disabled.SS folder is located outside of Program Files, but steam itself isn't.I'll try to install Kingdoms outside of program files and see how it goes.

[z3p]

Nope, still the exact same problem.

Not sure what else to try.. i've done clean re-installs of both kingdoms and SS and nothing's working. SS is one of, if not the best, mod for a TW game i've ever played, so i'm kinda shattered.

[Skyfighter]

What I did was install steam itself, as well as Medieval II and Stainless Steel outside of program files and that fixed it for me. Just cut and paste the SteamApps folder and Steam.exe somewhere else and running Steam.exe will take care of the rest. Then maybe try reinstalling everything into the new Steam folder? I know it seems like the folder that Steam is in shouldn't really matter, but everything was sunshine and roses after I did that. If that doesn't work, bugger if I know.

[z3p]

Unfortunately no luck for me.. thanks though man. I'm glad it's working for you at least haha.

In-case anyone has advice for more things i can try;

-OS is Windows 8
-Steam is now outside of program files
-M2 is installed outside of program files
-UAC is always disabled
-SS was working fine up until a few days ago (coincidentally there was a steam update that day)

Is there a way to find an error dump for what happens when it fails to launch?

[z3p]

Ohhhhhhhhhh nevermind, Skyfighter you're a genius. It works now if i run it from the kingdoms launcher.

Thanks buddy! who needs the mod team when we have you around.