(2025) OBS won't open/start.

[starmage]

Not very tech-savvy, so unsure of what's happening.
Every time I open OBS it doesn't appear in my hotbar and is always running as a background application. I've tried reinstalling multiple times... it just randomly started acting like this one day and not sure why. Command prompt gives me a 740 error even though I'm the only one on this computer, so no clue what to do about that. Tried referencing this forum, which had the same problem in 2022, but nothing seems to be helping me.

Here's some crash logs from the recent times I attempted to open it. If anyone could tell me what might be wrong, please lmk!! I got vids i gotta work on here in less than a month...

 

[Suslik V]

Please, attach your crash reports. Path for crash reports: %APPDATA%\obs-studio\crashes\

 

[starmage]

Oh, my bad! Again, bad with tech, so I didn't realise there's a separate folder for that.

 

[Suslik V]

How you are closing OBS?

 

[starmage]

Either from Task Manager or Steam. Mostly TM though.

 

[AaronD]

Either from Task Manager or Steam. Mostly TM though.

That might explain the crash. There are a variety of signals that can be sent to a program to make it do things, at least one of which is supposed to shut it down cleanly as if the user clicked the button. But OBS doesn't respond correctly to that signal (at least), and so it ends up getting killed, which is indistinguishable from a crash.

As for why it doesn't restart though, I don't know. I've been sending the TERM signal to it myself, from an overall system management script on Linux (if that's the wrong signal, please let me know; it's easy to change), and telling it to ignore the crash detection on startup, from the same script. It's always worked for me, but if we have a case where it doesn't, that could be a problem.

 

[starmage]

Not sure what a TERM signal is But thanks lots for your input.
Also, not sure if this is worth noting, but those were the ONLY 2 crashes in the crash log. Nothing more recent than those.

 

[Suslik V]

Usually, OBS has tray icon (the one near the Windows clocks, this icon can be hidden too). Can OBS window be opened via this tray icon?

 

[starmage]

Oh, yes it can! I feel a bit stupid now lol... thank you so much though.

 

[Suslik V]

OBS has Settings > General tab (or somewhere) > System Tray (group) > Minimize to system tray when started check box.