Recently I have been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic.  It is the first time I have ever tried an MMORPG.  I am a fan of most everything Star Wars, so, I had to try it out.  Sadly, after playing for a few weeks, I was greeted with this:

SWTOR

Skip to the fix…

Popping open task manager showed that, even though the launcher was not visible on the task bar or anywhere on my screen, the program was indeed running:

SWTOR

 

I ended the “launcher.exe” process and tried to open the launcher again.  Nothing seemed to happen.  So, I clicked on the launcher a third time.  This time, the same error, “Only a single instance of this application can run”. Next, I navigated to the folder containing launcher.exe to see if there were any clues there.  There is a second executable called “FixLauncher.exe”.  But, that only resulted in a new error:

SWTOR

 

Since it told me to restart my computer, I assumed this was due to the fact that launcher.exe was running in the background again.  I opened up task manager again, and indeed, launcher.exe was running.  I ended it and ran FixLauncher.exe again.  This time there were no errors but the installed exited without any sort of message.  Then, I tried launcher.exe again.  Still, nothing.  I opened up task manager and closed the launcher.exe process again. At this point, I decided to do some Googling.  I found a post on the SWTOR forum, but it didn’t help.  It basically suggested to do what I just described doing above.  Not much help.  But, then I found this answer on the Gaming Stack Exchange: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/49716.  In the answer, Adanion suggests to delete the patch folder.  So, I deleted the patch folder:

SWTOR

 

Ran FixLauncher.exe again:

SWTOR **

 

Drum Roll Please…

** SWTOR

 

Success! After the launcher updated itself, it reopened ready to login.  After logging in, the launcher started downloading the latest game updates and all was right in the world again!

SWTOR

TL;DR…

  1. Open task manager and look for “launcher.exe”.  If it is in the process list, kill it.  Be sure it actually dies before moving on.
  2. Open explorer and navigate to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\BioWare\Star Wars – The Old Republic”.
  3. Delete the “patch” folder.
  4. Run “FixLauncher.exe”.
  5. Run “launcher.exe”.
  6. The launcher will update itself and then you should be able to login and play as normal.