How to Fix Anaconda Doesn’t Launch Issue

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Last Updated on September 1, 2022 by Jay

My Anaconda doesn’t launch properly after a fresh installation. After clicking on the Anaconda Navigator, a black screen flashes and then disappears immediately. If you have this problem, this tutorial might help you fix the issue.

Download & Install Anaconda

Anaconda Distribution is a popular software that includes Python and R programming languages for scientific computing. It comes with over 250 pre-installed python libraries, so it’s pretty convenient and we can just use things like pandas or numpy right out of the box.

I prefer to always download from an official website, so here you go: https://www.anaconda.com/

Note this distribution will install the Python version 3.9 64-bit version.

I have multiple versions of Python installed on my computer, and don’t want Anaconda to mess with my computer settings. So I left both these options unchecked during the installation. This means I might have to adjust some settings later manually, but that’s okay.

Briefly, I got a message saying Anaconda installed successfully.

Anaconda Doesn’t Launch

After the installation when I tried to open the Anaconda Navigator, something weird happened. A black screen flashes and then disappeared immediately. The Anaconda program failed to open.

Then I tried to open the Anaconda Prompt. This worked, and I was able to get into the conda environment hoping to update conda.

In the Anaconda Prompt, I typed conda update conda. However, the update failed with a message:

ImportError: DLL load failed while importing shell: The specified procedure could not be found.

The Fix

If your experience is similar to mine so far, then this simple trick might help you fix this Anaconda problem.

You probably have the library pywin32 installed on your global Python interpreter (i.e. not in a virtual environment). And the library is probably a more recent version, for me it was the version 304.

To check the version, bring up a command prompt, type pip show pywin32. Then we’ll see something like this if our computer already has the library:

This library is the problem, we can do one of the following:

1. Remove pywin32 completely – just type pip uninstall pywin32 in cthe ommand prompt, or
2. Downgrade pywin32 to version 228 – type pip install –upgrade pywin32=228 in the command prompt window. If you still need to use the pywin32 library for other things, this might be your option.

After getting rid of version 304 pywin32, the Anaconda will launch properly. Now enjoy!

Additional Resources

pip is not recognized – How to fix it?