Cannot Open OBS After Installation

[BorderlessCommerce]

All of a sudden OBS Studio will not boot up on my laptop where it used to before.

Errors I get when I try to troubleshoot:

• Failed to find locale/en-US.ini
• Failed to load locale

Steps I have already taken:

• Uninstall and Reinstalled latest OBS version
• Ensured my NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3060 is updated with the latest driver
• Windows 11 system and drivers all updated
• Compatibility to open as admin and run on Windows 8 (also set to run OBS as admin)
• Check my device manager and selected high performance NVIDIA driver for OBS program
• Added OBS to the list to not be affected by firewall
• Closed any related programs that are similar/compete with OBS
• Restarted computer for all these steps
• Researched on google, youtube, discord for solution and none of them work

My Computer Specs

• Dell XPS 17 9710
• 32 GB RAM
• 11th Gen i7 Core processor: i7-11800H
• GEForce RTX 3060
• 1TB SSD

I would greatly appreciate if anybody could give some advice. OBS used to be my goto for content cretion. Thanks in advanced.

 

[Harold]

• Failed to find locale/en-US.ini
• Failed to load locale

These errors indicate a bad shortcut, usually that the start in path is wrong.

Compatibility to open as admin and run on Windows 8 (also set to run OBS as admin)

Remove the compatibility for the old version of windows, as it never fixes anything and is more likely to break obs. Any troubleshooting guide that tells you to turn it on is suspect at best.

 

[BorderlessCommerce]

These errors indicate a bad shortcut, usually that the start in path is wrong.


Remove the compatibility for the old version of windows, as it never fixes anything and is more likely to break obs. Any troubleshooting guide that tells you to turn it on is suspect at best.

Thanks for your input. I deleted the shortcut and ran OBS as an admin from its file path C:\Program Files\obs-studio\bin\64bit

I also unchecked the compatibility option. After doing both of these, I still get the same results. Spinning cursor wheel for like 2 seconds, then OBS doesnt start up. When I try to run the troubleshooter under OBS properties, it still gives me the same locale error. Any other ideas?

 

[Harold]

Windows' compatibility troubleshooter should honestly be avoided.
The locale errors happening when you open the executable directly from the program files folder may be indicating something else on the system actively interfering.

If you have also recently added browser docks from kick popouts like their moderation panel, those have been known to directly cause silent shutdowns of OBS.

 

[BorderlessCommerce]

Windows' compatibility troubleshooter should honestly be avoided.
The locale errors happening when you open the executable directly from the program files folder may be indicating something else on the system actively interfering.

If you have also recently added browser docks from kick popouts like their moderation panel, those have been known to directly cause silent shutdowns of OBS.

Any ideas to pinpoint what may be interfering? I tried checking firewall or any video software (like zoom) and made sure to close those out/disable them.

I actually dont use any browser docks. (except for like the standard audio, scenes, etc.) I use OBS mainly for recording videos and it streamlines my workflow to upload and edit videos. I can't even open OBS though to check the log so it is hard to pinpoint the issue to troubleshoot.

 

[Harold]

Antivirus eating components of OBS is the most likely problem.

The log files are stored in %appdata%\obs-studio\logs and you don't need to launch obs to get there.

 

[BorderlessCommerce]

Antivirus eating components of OBS is the most likely problem.

The log files are stored in %appdata%\obs-studio\logs and you don't need to launch obs to get there.

Thanks for that! Here is my latest log attempt. Alot of files failed to load. Thoughts?

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

As Harold noted - have you tried disabling MacAfee to test?

And have you tried running OBS as a regular user, vs admin? {beware settings stored in \User Profile, so things may not be the same, but does OBS run}. I suggest this this as a troubleshooting to narrow down issue. Other approach would be to log in as admin, and run OBS Studio from there {again, just to test OBS Studio working, not to run game/stream/record}

 

[BorderlessCommerce]

SOLUTION:

Thanks to the people in the discord, my root problem was not antivirus (which I uninstalled), but instead my VPN named Astrill. After I uninstalled the VPN it worked like a charm. However, I must use Astrill to steam to Youtube from my location, so the solution to that was to unzip the OBS files into my documents, then in that same documents folder, create a blank document called portable_mode.txt and then it all worked with Astrill VPN on. Thank you so much for your input and now I can continue with my content creation in peace!

 

[Suslik V]

It is named to use "portable" version of OBS:

Bug Report - Crash with «Could not find locale.ini path» when opening app Settings

Probably, a duplicated issue. If so, please point to a thread with solution. When I open settings while a brand new scene is showing, settings window opens fine and look like working fine, but if I add at least one source, settings stop opening and app starts crashing each time a Settings...

obsproject.com

Solution (to uninstall VPN), by itself, sounds strange.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

In that case, I suspect VPN only sort of your issue. the real issue maybe is that your VPN runs in your User context (at Operating System level), but you were running OBS Studio in a different user context (admin)??
Is that a SSL VPN, or IPSec? An IPSec VPN tunnel, properly configured at Operating System level, should be configurable to not have that user context issue.

Then again, I recommend against running OBS (or anything else) as Admin, unless absolutely required. For GPU scheduling reasons on Windows, in certain circumstances, running OBS as admin is sometimes required, but far less often than it is recommended especially on modern hardware