Hi McNeel
I’ve just had to re-install my Windows after updating to the latest wip. And having reinstalled windows and the wip, it has just broken the windows install again. I can’t tell you why, but the result is Windows explorer crashing and restarting over and over and over again. Will see if I can uninstall, but since I have no start button and can’t access the settings app, I’ll probably have start over with the win install. Safe to say, I’m out of the wip cycle for now.
-Jakob
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Hi Jakob -
@AndyPayne ran into this yesterday. Apparently when he finally managed to get to the Windows Control Panel to the Add/Remove applications page and uninstalled Rhino from there, Windows was stable and installing the latest Rhino 9 version was fine.
But, yes, I understand you’ll want to stay away from the WIP for now…
-wim
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Yiiiiiii!
A few weeks ago, while I was at Shape to Fabrication in London, my laptop started doing that. I’m not sure it happened immediately after installing the WIP though. The symptoms were like you said - I would get the screen flashing about once every two seconds and it was not possible to launch anything except task manager via the keyboard. It was indeed Windows Explorer that was constantly crashing and restarting. I managed at the time to start Windows in safe mode and restore back to one week earlier, and that fixed it - unfortunately only temporarily.
The next week, when I was in class with my apprentices, it started again. This time a system restore didn’t help. Nothing did. I finally had to reinstall Windows as well. As the laptop was still on Windows 10, since I had to reinstall everything anyway, I first reinstalled Win 10, then installed Windows 11 over that. I do have the WIP installed (haven’t really used it though) - so far no problem, but now you have me scared… 
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Thanks for the tip @wim - By jumping through hoops (opening an Explorer window via Task Manager and then creating a shortcurt to ms-settings on my desktop via the right click menu and “spam-clicking” it until it launched), I did indeed get into settings and was able to successfully uninstall Rhino 9, bringing Windows back to normal immediately.
How on earth is there something in the Rhino installer that can cause this kind of mayhem? That’s just… mind-blowingly bad 
-Jakob
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Wow, I wish I’d known that before I started reinstalling everything… Would have saved me a couple of days… 
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This indeed sounds quite worrying! Can you provide further information/recommendations about how we should proceed (e.g. uninstall the WIP for now)? I really don’t want to have to deal with what @Normand and @Helvetosaur are describing 
Yeah… I’ve been at it since yesterday around noon, so couldn’t agree more. And of course the WIP was the second-to-last piece of software I installed today, so my heart did a 360° when I realized it was Rhino causing this. I’m glad, that I got it to uninstall second time around - spending another 5-6 hours re-installing software, adding printers, logging into God know how many accounts etc. would have killed me (Or rather: I think my boss would have taken a bat to my head!) 
-Jakob
As I mentioned, this only came up yesterday, and only now, after other reports, we can (likely) rule out cosmic rays and/or failing hardware.
Incidentally, is anyone using tortoise git?
-wim
Sorry, no - Had to look it up
-Jakob
Does it mean no launching WiP in Win11 until further notice from McNeel?
Hi @Piotr
Well, I won’t be, but if you already have the WIP installed, you should be safe. What I have been experiencing, was that it was the actual install of the WIP that messed my Windows up, not running the program. As soon as the install was done, my desktop started blinking and Windows Explorer started restarting over and over. And as soon as the uninstall had completed, everything went back to normal - just like that. I know next to nothing about how a PC works, so I won’t even venture a guess on what happened.
If anyone should run into the same, here are the steps I had to go through in order to get back to a functioning work station:
- Ctrl+alt+delete and log out
- Click power button in lower right corner while holding Shift - keep holding Shift until screen goes black
- On restart you should no go into Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE)
- Go to Troubleshoot and select Command Prompt
- Once in the command prompt, first run System File Checker: sfc /scannow
- The run Deployment Image Servicing and Management: dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
- Restart PC and let it boot - and then log in as you normally would
- Windows should still be blinking, so Ctrl+Alt+Delete and into Task Manager
- In order to get a file explorer window open, you need to go to Processes and Right Click on one of the background processes and select “Open file Location”
- In that File Explorer window, navigate to the Desktop and Right Click>New>Shortcut - and you have to be speedy about it, since Explorer crashes every 3-4 seconds.
- In the dialog box, type ms-settings: and click next (yes, the : is intentional)
- Give the shortcut a name (eg. “Save Me”) and launch it by right clicking in the previous explorer window and selecting “Open” from the menu - again, you might have to try more than few times to execute before Explorer crashes again.
- Hopefully you’ll now have full access to the Settings and can go to Apps and uninstall Rhino WIP.
Surely there are easier ways to get there and some steps might even be unnecessary, but this was what worked for me
HTH, Jakob
HTH, Jako
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ISTR that once you start Windows in Safe mode - one of the choices offered via Recovery Environment - you can access the Apps/Programs section of Windows to uninstall stuff. I just didn’t know to uninstall Rhino 9 at the time…
Windows would start for me in Safe Mode without Explorer crashing. Someone correct me if you tried this and it didn’t work…
Hi @Helvetosaur
I tried that, but Windows (or Rhino) wouldn’t let me complete the uninstall in safe mode. I got the following:
Uninstall Failed with error code en_lang_pack:-2147023295
But again, every system is different, so YMMV
-Jakob
Hmm, wonder if there aren’t some registry entries that could be deleted to fix that.
What worked for me was uninstalling Rhino 9 WIP via the command line. Here’s how I did that.
- Hit Ctrl + Alt + Delete and open the Task Manager
- At the top of the Task Manager, you’ll see a button that says “Run New Task”. Click that.
- Type “cmd” in the input dialog. Make sure to check the toggle to “Create this task with administrative privileges”.
- The command line shell should open. Type in the following command
wmic product where name="Rhino Wip" call uninstall - This should uninstall Rhino WIP and hopefully it will stop the blinking/crashing of explorer.exe
One thing to note was that after I did all of that and my task bar returned to normal, I then went to Add/Remove Programs and found that some remnant of Rhino 9 was still installed. I then uninstalled Rhino 9 again using this method. After that, I was able to reinstall Rhino 9 and everything worked as expected.
To note, we are trying to diagnose this internally and will hopefully have a fix soon. If anyone has a way to replicate the cause of this issue, please let us know. This would help us troubleshoot this issue.
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Bookmarking this post…
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OK, so @AndyPayne did it 5 steps instead of my 13 steps 
Like I said: I’m totally in the blind as for how stuff ACTUALLY works inside Windows/computers in general. But I’m just glad that the mere idea of getting the WIP uninstalled without direct access to the settings app was planted in my brain by Andy (via Wim) - it saved me the better part of a full day of installing the whole thing from scratch once more, even if mu route wasn’t exactly A to B, but rather something along the lines of A>K>L>Ö>S>B>. Things like this is of course the risk we take using the WIP, although the (potential) severity of this particular bug, is beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Hopefully you’ll be able to identify what’s causing this soon 
Cheers, Jakob
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I figured out my fix for this after trying about eight other things which didn’t work… so I feel your pain.
Now I’m glad I uninstalled the WIP weeks ago
Stay safe everyone the Rhino is running wild!
This is super painful, and we want to get to the bottom of it ASAP.
We have one person (Andy) in our office that had the issue once, it looks like one person in public. We aren’t able to reproduce it anymore, so we don’t know what to fix. When it happened internally, there was speculation that the problem was related to hardware starting to fail. That may not be the case.
It’s particularly odd that uninstalling and reinstalling the same exact build doesn’t cause the problem to reproduce. This makes it quite difficult to understand what we need to do to fix it.