Wednesday, September 16, 2009

FlashBuilder 4 silently fails while launching

Imagine this... You double click the icon to launch FlashBuilder and see the splash screen show up. Then you glance away from the screen and when you look back, FlashBuilder isn't running. No error Alert. No phantom process running in task manager... just nothing at all.

This happened a few times because I started to think I was imagining the part where I clicked the icon and saw the splash screen. So I would try to launch it again. It turns out that I am not going mad. FlashBuilder was really failing silently and just failing to launch. I tried deleting my workspace and launching again, but every time I did that it would recreate the workspace directory automatically and then fail to start.

Searching Google for "FlashBuilder won't start" yielded only one promising result but >the link was to a Jira defect that I can't see. I was about to call the professionals at ITFixed to have someone perform CPR on my machine when I figured I would try one last thing. Since FlashBuilder is basically Eclipse, I tried the old -clean command and like magic it came back to life.

Just open a command prompt to the directory where FlashBuilder is installed (On Vista: C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flash Builder Beta2) and execute the magic command:
Gumbo.exe -clean

I'm not quite sure what caused the problem in the first place. I had gotten a few out of memory errors (even though my machine has 4GB or RAM) but I can't say for sure that the problems are related.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

this happened to me as well. I had to remove/reinstall gumbo. Next time, I'll try the same as you. thanks.

Anonymous said...

Thanks a million for that tip! It worked, whereas the long list of things to try from Adobe did nothing but invalidate all my licenses for their software. 8-(

Anonymous said...

I just wonder if flexbuilder doesn't even write anything to it's logfile ([your_workspace_location]/.metadata/.log) in such a situation ...

Matthew Erwin said...

This is likely due to a permissions issue during launch...right click on your icon - and choose "Run as Administrator"

You can choose to launch this way every time by going into Properties->Compatibility and chosing "Run this program as an administrator"