I’m having serious trouble getting Brave (standard install) to launch on my Windows 10 PC. It was working fine until recently, but now when I try to open it, nothing happens at all – no error message, no crash window, just nothing.
Here’s a summary of what I’ve tried so far (all with admin rights):
Things I’ve already tested:
Checked Task Manager → no brave.exe process shows up
Ran brave.exe via CMD with logging flags (--enable-logging, --v=1) → no logs generated
Tried launching with:
--user-data-dir="C:\Temp\BraveTest" → no effect
--disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer → no effect
Ran sfc /scannow → Windows found & repaired system file issues
Disabled Windows Defender real-time protection → no difference
Deleted all Brave folders in:
C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\
C:\Users\MyName\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\
Reinstalled Brave multiple times (latest version)
Also tested Brave Portable (from Portapps.io) → this version works perfectly
When I copy my old User Data folder into the fresh install, Brave stops working again – so I only restored bookmarks/passwords from Default/
System specs:
OS: Windows 10 Home (64-bit), fully updated
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER (driver updated)
Antivirus: Windows Defender, CCleaner
Brave Version: Latest stable release (via official installer)
Portable Version Used: Brave Portable 1.80.115 (Portapps)
Brave Portable works just fine, but I’d really prefer to return to the standard installed version (for proper integration, default browser use, etc.).
Any idea what might be causing this? Happy to provide debug logs, crash reports or run diagnostic tools if needed.
Thanks in advance!
– Jakob
How can this issue be reproduced?
Expected result:
Opening the browser lol
Brave Version( check About Brave):
An error occurred while checking for updates: Update check failed to start (error code 1: 0X80004005).
I just checked it out and it’s not really like my case to be honest. I also tried the steps that got recommended there but nothing worked. Do you have any other solutions maybe?
Seemed to match with your case because the issue was that the browser wasn’t opening. It would also align with why you might have issues once you restored data from your profile, as it would have contained the files locked behind admin access. So you would have had to reassign those as it shows in the post.
If you made sure you’re not opening as admin and you went through to reassign all the folder values away from admin and to your user account but still having issues, I would question if it’s an antivirus or firewall preventing it from opening. But if that’s the case I wouldn’t have thought that it would let it open on standalone and it would have also had issues before you moved over your files.
Next thing I’d consider is if it’s just some other corruption in your Default folder.
Not sure if that’s correct. Not going to say it’s wrong, but what normally would be done is changing the target line on your shortcut to be something like:
Btw, this also goes back to what I was saying. One of the more recent Chromium changes breaks things if you’re doing as admin. So if you’re running with administrator rights, it’ll not launch. Or even if it does launch, you’ll have issues with components. So you want it not to be under administrator but instead just the user account.
click on the search bar and copy paste this command Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options
Things I’ve already tested:
System specs: