PC - Bug Steam has crashed

[Master Magician]

I have been unable to play via Steam for over a week. I have tried on two separate laptops (which have absolutely nothing in common, including operating system). When I load Steam and get past the updates to the "Play Pinball Arcade" Button, the next pop-up screen is "Failure to Launch Game, App already running."
There's a link there to the troubleshoot forums, which looks like a form letter and doesnt address the issue specifically. It recommends to "delete the appcache folder and reboot," which I did to no effect.
Both these laptops have been playing Pinball Arcade for months, since its release on Steam, with no issues. This problem popped out of nowhere with the release of Junk Yard.
So anyone else have this issue? And what do I do now?

 

[soundwave106]

Crashing wise, the main bug I've had is that Junkyard (on my machine) will crash if you switch to another window. Most games will pop up to the "resume" screen just fine, but for some reason switching windows on Junkyard causes a "Pinballarcade.exe has stopped working..."

Apart from that, I've been playing the challenge lately, and the main bugs I've encountered lately are the usual missing balls after a multiball (in Monster Bash and Black Knight, but this seems to pop up on a few other machines as well) and a weird situation in Twilight Zone after LITZ where balls were loaded into the plunger instead of being fed to the autoplunger and back to the gumball machine. (This actually might be an original ROM bug of sorts because I remember playing a real life machine that did this unexpectedly). High Speed also sometimes randomly crashes on long games (was still able to get a few really long games in without crashes though) and the personal high score chart displays any rollover score as 9,999,999 (a minor quibble but most tables display the actual score, not the rollover value).

 

[Master Magician]

I'd love to get far enough to get a table to crash. At the moment, Steam doesnt even let you get to the opening screen :/

 

[Timelord]

I runs fine for me including window swapping on Junkyard.

It would help Farsight reproduce your problem and /or assist you in sorting your particular issues if they knew your hardware specs and OS versions

Timelord ...

 

[Master Magician]

I runs fine for me including window swapping on Junkyard.

It would help Farsight reproduce your problem and /or assist you in sorting your particular issues if they knew your hardware specs and OS versions

Timelord ...

Windows 7 Home Premium under service pack 1
AMD Phenom N620 Duel-Core Processor 2.8 Ghz
4 GB RAM
64 bit operating system

I'd have to dig around for anything more complicated. But I dont think any of that is the problem. I've been playing via Steam ever since PA has been on Steam, on this machine. My problem came out of nowhere. Steam has some new update or something that counteracts PA.

 

[netizen]

make a copy of C://Users/.../My Games/The Pinball Arcade and save it in another location then delete the The Pinball Arcade folder from My Games
Go to your steam installation folder and delete PinballArcade.exe from Steam/Steam Apps/Common/Pinball Arcade

Make sure you have completely shut down Steam, and check in your task manger to be sure it has shut down.
Restart your computer, windows is funky that way.
If you don't have Steam start with windows, start the Steam Client, don't try to start TPA with a short cut. When steam is open right click Pinball Arcade in the library list and select properties. In the properties menu, choose the local files tab, and press "verify integrity of game cache" it will take a few minutes and will Download a new exe that you deleted, as well as confirm there are no corrupt files.

After the verification see if TPA starts. If it does exit, and shut down Steam. Replace the folder to saved from My Games and open Steam and try again. If you have problems after that then your local high scores are corrupt/bad somehow and you'll need to ditch them.

If none of that helps then ... try emailing support

 

[Master Magician]

Thanx. Ill try that right away.
I already have emailed support. They asked for copies of my log.txt, but then I never heard back.

 

[Master Magician]

Ok just did the "verify integrity" bit. No go (seemed like a good idea, I had high hopes for it). And deleting the high scores. So is the only thing left to uninstall all of steam and hope it works again on the reinstall? Still no answer from tech support either.

 

[goforthewall]

If anybody still has this problem, try the following:

[WARNING YOUR GAME FILES WILL BE ERASED!]

Uninstall Steam completely. Redownload and install the client. Redownload "Pinball Arcade". (And all the other games that got erased through uninstalling...)

It works! This is only a last resort option, but after two months of trying everything to get TPA back up and running, this finally did the trick