[texworks] Compatibility Problem

[K. Frank]

Hello Ed!

On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Edward MacKinnon
<emackinnon at comcast.net> wrote:
> I haven't used texworks for months. Now neither Texworks not Texmaker will
> start. I am running them under Windows 7, which worked in the past. Does
> anyone know how to fix this ?

This is a complete shot in the dark.  I had a similar problem where
TeXworks stopped working (on windows 7).  What had happened
is I had  a so-called python-enabled version of TeXworks, but did not
have python installed.  The environment variable PYTHON_HOME
(or something similar) was not defined and TeXworks worked.

But then installing another application caused PYTHON_HOME
to be defined (and point to a non-existent drive), but uninstalling
the application didn't clean up the environment variable.

Now TeXworks wouldn't run, vanishing silently almost immediately
after start-up.  My speculation is that the python-enabled TeXworks
checked for PYTHON_HOME, and when is wasn't defined, didn't
activate python.  But when PYTHON_HOME was defined TeXworks
tried to initialize is python subsystem (or whatever), and when python
couldn't find an actual python installation, it bombed out silently
without providing any useful diagnostics.

In my case, I deleted the PYTHON_HOME environment variable,
and TeXworks happily worked again.

It was all very mysterious when this was going on.

Like I said, it's probably not your issue, but a quick look couldn't
hurt.

> Ed. MacK


Good luck.


K. Frank