All my Paradox Grand Strategy games crash on start

[Durin Duranbah]

Hi,

I have an rather weird Issue with my paradox games (CK2, EUIV, HOI4 and Stellaris)
All of them "stop working" on startup.

All exept HOI4 who gets an:

Cities Skylines works just fine, as appearently do all my other games. Its just those four that wont start anymore.

I already checked the gamefiles of all of them and reinstalled CK2 and HOI4 without any luck.

At this point I would guess something is wrong with my windows or why would all those games stop working...
Any suggestions for how I can fix this?

My specs:

Windows 10 64-Bit
Intel Core i5-3450 3.10 GHz
Nvidia GeForce GTX 960
12 GB Ram

 

[AndrewT]

Did this happen to all 4 at the same time? When was that, if so?

What change or update occurred between the last time any one of them worked, and the first time any one of them had this problem? A Windows update perhaps?

If you exit Steam entirely and run the games' .exe files, do you get any better error?

 

[Durin Duranbah]

I hadn't played for any of them for a while, so yeah there had been windows updates for sure.
I noticed it today after starting one and getting that wierd error message. So I started another one same deal. After that I got curious started all paradox games and got the same deal (exept cities skylines but I think that is a different engine?)

Running the games without steam just now got me the same error message as before, exept that HOI4 also gave me the stopped working notice instead of the runtime error.

I know I bought and played the leviathans Story pack on the 4th of november so we are talking about a timeframe of a few weeks.

Is there any list of windows components that I can check if they got scrambled or something? I don't really now where to start to look.

 

[AndrewT]

Basically there are three causes of this I'm aware of:

- Windows 10 Anniversary update damaging DirectX 9 and Visual C++
- an anti-virus app getting in the way
- someone manually moving the Windows User Documents folder, so the games cannot find it.

There's no real way of picking which one is the case except by trying each one.

- To test the last one, Use Notepad to make a new text file called userdir.txt in the Steam Hearts of Iron IV folder where hoi4.exe is. In that file place a single dot, save and exit. This tells the game to write the user files right there instead of under Documents. If that works and the game now runs, you can replace that dot with any file path you like.

- to test the middle one, delete or move the documents/paradox/ folder for any one of the games, the try running that game - does it recreate it?

- the first one might take some work. If you are lucky this will help it:
Please go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Stellaris\_CommonRedist\DirectX\Jun2010\ and run dxsetup.exe
Please go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Stellaris\_CommonRedist\vcredist\2010\ and run vcredist_x86.exe and vcredist_x64.exe

Is there any list of windows components that I can check if they got scrambled or something? I don't really now where to start to look.

There are thousands of files that are part of Windows. I'm not sure a list of them would be very useful to you. You could run scannow /sfc if you like.

 

[Durin Duranbah]

ok the thing with the textfile in the HOI4 folder worked.

Somehow the place where windows stores the documents got scrambled beyond belive. I had them on E: now when I try to open the documents folder he wants somewhere on H: (I don't have an H and the place he points to in the settings is F:

So I think I know where to look now to get this mess sorted out. WTF microsoft..... as usual


Thanks for the help