Qt Creator & Designer fail to launch, even after reinstallation

CarsonAl

I have quite the peculiar and challenging problem. As of yesterday, I have been unable to open the Qt Creator application on my Lenovo Windows 11 machine. This bug also appears to affect Qt Designer. Even more bizarre is that there exists no error output of any kind. It appears to instantly crash before doing much of anything.
Possibly relevant details of my installation are as follows:

Installation includes the open source Qt Design Studio 4.2.0, Qt 6.5.2, Qt Creator 11.0.2 & CDB Debugger Support, Debugging Tools for Windows, MinGW11.2.0 64-bit, CMake 3.24.2, Ninja 1.10.2
Installed using the 4.5.2 Windows installer.
Using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 11, version 22H2

I have tried the following ideas to no avail or change to my situation:

Updating programs through the Qt Maintenance program
Uninstall and reinstall Qt in its entirety.
Uninstall and reinstall a different release of Qt (vers 6.4.3)
Uninstall and reinstall Qt under a different directory instead of the default Qt directory.
Disabled Windows Defender before running Qt Creator
Running Qt Creator as Administrator
Uninstalling the previous Windows update, Security Update KB5029263.
Installing Qt /w different Qt Mirrors.

As you can all see, it's quite the peculiar situation. With no error output (that I know of), I've got no clue how do debug this problem nor remaining ideas on how I could solve it. I hope the bright minds here may have a better idea than I had, as I am completely out of them.

SGaist

Hi and welcome to devnet,

One thing I would try is to build a dummy project from the command line to see if that one can start. That might help pinpoint the issue.

CarsonAl

Thank you for the welcome, SGaist!

I return with bad news and good news. The good news is that qmake & the resulting makefile do successfully build projects on my end. I tried this with two projects some colleagues passed onto me.

What's curious is that one of the resulting executables will open, while the other does not. It simply fails to launch, much liker Designer & Creator. That would suggest that there might be some shared library or method that the latter utilizes that is not required by the former. I wonder if this involves something that is shared between it, Creator, & Designer?

cristian-adam

You can do the following things to find out what's going on with Qt Creator.

Getting access to the Qt Creator logs

Set the environment variable QT_LOGGING_RULES=qtc*=true
Start DebugView to capture the debug log messages
Start Qt Creator

Hopefully something will pop up in the DebugView

Errors reported by the operating system

In the Windows "Event Viewer" application in the "Windows Logs" category usually the "Application" and "System" contain traces that might help pinpoint the failure

Taking Qt Creator startup under the magnifying glass

Using Process Monitor and filtering after qtcreator.exe you can find out all the file access, registry access and so forth.

Good luck finding the root cause.

CarsonAl

Hello, late update here, with some news.

First of all, I had discovered why I had not received any error notifications while trying to open Qt Creator. With my laptop, I'll typically have it connected to two other monitors through a USB docking station. While preparing to do some testing away from my desk, I had removed the laptop from the docking station. The next time I tried to open Qt Creator, a pop up appeared showing the error: Qt Creator simply could not find Core.dll ! (Additionally, said error would not appear when I re-docked the laptop)

Now, I would've been delighted to resolve this error and report back to you all, but a few hours later, my computer bricked itself for completely unrelated reasons. Sometimes life gives you lemons, and at others life pelts you with its lemons. I am now replying to this post on a temporary replacement.

For the meantime, perhaps I ought to mark this post as resolved, despite not getting a chance to address the root error of the missing Core.dll link? Additionally, should I make a bug post regarding the failure to produce an error pop up when utilizing multiple monitors? (I tried looking for a relevant bug, but perhaps this is a known bug that I am unaware of).

Thanks to everyone that helped!

jesstal

In the chance someone else stumbles upon it this while beating their head trying to figure out WHY Qt Creator mysteriously won't start anymore, I wanted to share what worked for me. After scouring the internet for hours today when both Qt Creator and Qt Design Studio mysteriously wouldn't open anymore, I found QTBUG-50371. Apparently it's still a bug, because sure enough, when I disconnected my second monitor, they were magically able to start again.

SGaist

@jesstal Hi and welcome to devnet,

Since you have a setup that reproduces this issue, I would recommend opening a new ticket (linking to the one that is mentioned as fixed) and explain their your current issue, setup, etc.