Once I exit LR it won't restart until I reinstall

This is a corporate IT problem with my work computer. It's a big corporation, response time is slow, so I'm trying to do some troubleshooting on my own while the IT wheels slowly grind.

I run a scanning electron microscope, I use Lightroom 2 strictly for photo cataloging, which is why I haven't upgraded (that and the fact that buying non standard software is a convoluted mess and headache.) The catalog is on the local disk, the photos are on a network drive.

Until last week I had a 7 year old Dell workstation with a 2.4ghz Xeon processor, NVIDIA Quadro graphics card (don't have the model # with me right now), 4gb ram and a 500gb spinning disk hard drive. OS is Win 7 Enterprise edition.

I just got a new Dell workstation with Xeon E5-2623 cpu, Quadro 2200 GPU with 4gb vram, Samsung 500gb SSD, 16gb ram, still with Win7 Enterprise.

I installed LR with a DVD disk, everything is normal, it starts up and I point it to my current catalog. It recognizes everything, it's working as it did with the old PC. But if I exit LR it won't restart. Clicking on the desktop icon after I exit the program shows a brief spinning cursor of less than a second, then nothing happens, nothing at all. Program Manager shows that LR is not running. If I go directly to the program folder and click on the LR exe file the same thing happens, ie nothing happens.

I've done some troubleshooting. One Adobe page told me to delete LR preferences. I did, then when I tried to restart LR I get a dialog box asking for the catalog. I point it to the local catalog and click OK, and once again, nothing happens. I've updated all relevant drivers.

If I uninstall LR and reinstall everything works fine, I can add photos to the catalog, do everything I need to do. But if I exit the program then, once again, I can't restart.

I know what some will say, just leave it running. The problem with that is that we have continuous software updates that are forced on us, sometimes as many as once per week that usually involve restarting the PC. Plus, in order to install a program I have to request special admin acess, it's just a pain, not a process I want to regularly do.

Anyone out there have any idea what I can do?

Could you check the location of your catalog file to see if there is a .lock file?
Also, check your Event Viewer to see if any error for Lightroom was reported.

No lock file in the catalog folder. Event viewer shows a few warnings about group policy but no errors and nothing naming LR.

I've had that happen with both PS and LR in the past. Never really pinned down the reason, I thought in my case it may have been a plugin that was causing issues.

As a workaround instead of reinstalling try killing the process:

1. Ctrl+Alt+Del
2. Start Task manager
3. Select the Processes tab
4. Find the lightroom.exe process
5. Right click on it and End Process

You should now be able to start LR.

While unfortunately I can not give you a definitive answer there are a few suggestions you can check on.
I am thinking since you are on a shared network it may be a permissions issue. You didn't mention any permission warnings but that doesn't mean somewhere along the chain something is not being written to.

Lightroom has difficulty working on networked storage systems as it relies on maintaining linkable addresses between the catalog, the previews and the actual image files. Catalog and previews need to reside on your workstation but images can be stored just about anywhere.

When LR opens a catalog it creates a temporary .lock file, as Cuongduong mentioned, in the same folder as your catalog file (yourCatFile.lrcat). It retains your catalog file name with the .lock suffix, ie yourCatFile.lrcat.lock. When LR is done using a catalog it will delete this file. If a system gets inadvertently shut down and you can't reopen it, this file is usually the culprit.

You mentioned you checked for this file and it wasn't there, leading me to think it may be another type of permission problem. Next time you have a catalog open go to your cat file location and check the permissions on both your catalog file and the lock file and see if they both have write permissions for user. I'm thinking that if it just has admin permissions there may be a delay in releasing the catalog and/or the program for a relaunch. Just wild conjecture there though at this point.

If the program itself is on the shared network and not on your workstation you will need to have IT check the read/write permissions and make sure they're set properly.

Have you ever had it lock you out and you just waited to see if the program reset itself? (Wild stab in the dark here)

On a side note; have you thought about Photo Mechanic? While I don't use it I hear great reviews for this software as a cataloging program.

Bcaps wrote in post #18048223
I've had that happen with both PS and LR in the past. Never really pinned down the reason, I thought in my case it may have been a plugin that was causing issues.
As a workaround instead of reinstalling try killing the process:
1. Ctrl+Alt+Del
2. Start Task manager
3. Select the Processes tab
4. Find the lightroom.exe process
5. Right click on it and End Process
You should now be able to start LR.

I had exactly the same problem soon after I installed LR6 on a new Win 10 machine, and for several days it would only restart by using the same method described by Bcaps above. Then it cleared up for some unknown reason and has been behaving ever since. Try it!

teekay wrote in post #18048298
I had exactly the same problem soon after I installed LR6 on a new Win 10 machine, and for several days it would only restart by using the same method described by Bcaps above. Then it cleared up for some unknown reason and has been behaving ever since. Try it!

Come to think of it, I've had similar problems with other programs (not LR) where there were multiple calls on a process to launch and it bound up the system. I cleared out all the processes and relaunched. That did do the trick.

Have you tried launching it from a CMD window to see if it shows an error? The command should be similar to this:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2\lightroom.exe

You can right click on the desktop icon and see what the actual path is.

If that doesn't work, check Task Manager => Processes and make sure Show Processes from all Users is clicked. Look to see if lightroom.exe is still running in the background somewhere.

If you can get LR to start, instead of closing it the normal way, try killing it in Task Manager and then see if it will reopen.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I actually had an IT guy at my desk yesterday afternoon and he was great, very helpful and willing to actually do some sleuthing instead of just blaming it on the software or the PC. Here is what he figured out.

The PC was first taken to the IT lab for initial configuration. They had asked me if there was additional software that needed to be installed that wasn't on the official list, MS Office and some other programs are licensed by the corporation and we can download and install from a managed website. I gave them the LR disk. LR was installed by IT using their admin user name when other programs were installed. When it was installed at my desk I logged in with my user name. The user name difference was causing the trouble. And uninstalling and reinstalling with my user name didn't work because LR left behind some stuff even when uninstalled. The clue to that was that the new install didn't ask for the license key, it filled it in automatically.

IT wiped everything clean and did an install using my user name. Things are working normally now.

I looked for just a cataloging program several years ago and actually bought one that was recommended here and on another forum, ID Imager. But it turned out to be a one man operation and he couldn't or wouldn't offer enough support. I was using LR2 at home and decided to go with a big name, so far it has done what I needed, I have about 75,000 photos cataloged by individual jobs and I frequently have to search that database for work done in the past. But maybe I need to check out Photo Mechanic and see if it can offer more than LR.

Glad to hear everything got resolved. I had a sneaky suspicion it was with the permissions as I've run into similar problems (on a lesser level) on my own system.

The reason I suggested Photo Mechanic is that (from what I understand) it is relatively more streamlined than LR. It allows you to organize, batch process, tag and keyword and even edit and export your images.

I love Lightroom (I even teach the software) but I am finding the more Adobe fiddles with it the worse it gets with each upgrade. It's getting slower, clumsier and more bloated with unneeded crap.