Twice today I’ve seen problems with ArcGIS 10 (and 10.1) failing to launch. In one instance, no specific application error was given – ArcMap just failed to start with a ‘serious error’ dialog, and in the other, some direction was provided by ArcMap in the form of an error message.<\/p>\n
In both cases, the user had a corrupt default<\/strong> user geodatabase<\/strong>. The location of the default geodatabase may be given in the error message. If not, it should be located in <user profile>\\My Documents\\ArcGIS. If you are working on a lab machine, the location will be h:\\ArcGIS\\ \u00a0The file is named Default.gdb<\/strong>, and if ArcMap has had trouble loading more than once, you may have multiple copies named\u00a0Default.gdb,\u00a0Default.gdb1,\u00a0Default.gdb2…<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n The ESRI knowledge base article 38523<\/a>\u00a0suggests several fixes, the most important of which seems to be deleting any Default.gdb<\/strong> files in the users profile directory. I found that using Windows worked properly, as ArcCatalog seems unable to remove the offending files. One machine I worked on today had more than 150<\/em> default.gdb files (all of which were corrupt and preventing ArcMap from launching).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twice today I’ve seen problems with ArcGIS 10 (and 10.1) failing to launch. In one instance, no specific application error was given – ArcMap just failed to start with a ‘serious error’ dialog, and in the other, some direction was … Continue reading