patndoris TechnoGeek

I ran into this myself last week when I updated to SP2 for Vista. Admittedly, SP2 has not been pushed out to users via automatic updates yet (but it is available publicly for download if you choose to install it now). So, this issue may become more widespread after SP2 rolls out to lots of Vista users in July. After a little searching, it appears there are a few users who have already experienced this same issue, and it affects both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista systems. Let me be 100% clear - this does not affect all Vista systems. I know people who have installed SP2 with no impact on WLM. I cannot tell you any way to know if you will experience this issue, but certainly it should not be a reason for you to not install SP2 for Vista. Service Packs include important security and operating system updates, and the WLM issue is easy enough to fix, at least it was for me.

Problem: After installing SP2 for Vista, there is the possibility WLM will not launch. Clicking on my WLM desktop icon produced no result. No error. No hourglass. No running process in Task Manager. Nothing. Not even an error that the shortcut pointed to a program that was no longer valid. Nothing. (And, for the geeks among you who will invariably question this, I did try running as Administrator, there are no other user accounts on the machine and I have UAC totally off.)

The natural thing to want to do is un-install and re-install, but for me, that’s a last resort. (After all, any good geek will tell you, it’s far more fun to struggle finding a workable solution.) And besides, from the posts I found, this may actually make things worse. After un-installing some people apparently had additional problems and errors, which seem to prevent the re-install from working. I decided not to attempt a repair of WLM either. (My logic being, if an un-install and re-install doesn’t necessarily work, there is a likelihood a repair won’t either.)

Solution: Instead, I headed over to Filehippo and grabbed the latest WLM version 14.0.8064 and just re-installed it right over top of the my existing installation. I did not get any warning that WLM was already installed on my system, and it installed flawlessly in just a couple of minutes.

I can’t say this will work for everyone, but if you run into this you may want to give it a try. There really is nothing to lose. Either it will work, or you’ll get a warning that you already have this version installed. If WLM won’t launch after installing Service Pack 2 for Vista, I can’t really see that there is the possibility of making anything worse by this course of action. I have yet to see any official acknowledgement of a problem with WLM and SP2, and it does not seem to be terribly widespread (yet), but I thought I’d toss my workaround out there for anyone who may find it useful.