Mathematica 10.0 (10.0.0.0 latest available) doesn’t start when called from start menu on Windows 8.1 x64. Kernel can be started separately and asks for activation, which works, after it I can compute, but Mathematica itself doesn’t start - occasionally I see splash logo for a second, then it disappears with windows error, but mostly nothing happens at all.
Reinstaling, clean start, manually removing configuration files and turning off McAfee did not help me.
Sorry I cannot help you on precisely this issue. Sounds like Mathematica’s front end won’t start for some reason. Is that right? Perhaps I can provide some “moral support” by telling you that my experience so far (also on a Windows 8.1 platform) is that Mathematica appears to have some stability issues. I have a pending case with tech support concerning Mathematica 10 completely crashing my machine while evaluating a simple expression: on two different computers with two different versions of Windows (7 and 8.1). (see attached notebook) Further, evaluation of the same expression using Mathematica 9 does not lead to any problems. Again, I know this doesn’t help you but I would definitely involve tech support so they know there are “issues” with the current release of Mathematica 10. Best of luck to you.
If you haven’t tried it already, here’s a possible solution to your problem: "Start the [front] end by double-
clicking on a .nb (not .cdf), which will start the front-end to the full Mathematica program, even though directly executing the front end
does not work.
Changing default printer in Windows’ Control Panel helped.Not sure that it matters, I had Ricoh Aficio printer and switched to virtual Bullzip PDF printer and it just started to load the front-end.
I had the same problem with Mathematica 10.1. I hoped upgrading to 10.3 would help but it did not. I have just found your posts and following Ivan’s “discovery” I changed my default Dell Color Laser 3110cn printer to something else and it worked. Now Mathematica 10.3 starts normally. Thanks!
Just registered exclusively to reply to this: I just installed Mathematica 10 (University license), couldn’t make it start, it always forze on the activation screen. I switched my default printer and BAM! Worked flawlessly. I think it’s REALLY weird that something like this can keep the software from starting! And that it still happens, on version 10.4.
I changed my default Dell Color Laser 3110cn printer to something else and it worked. Now Mathematica 10.3 starts normally. Thanks!