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.

Download Anaconda from its official website
Download Anaconda from its official website

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.

Uncheck both options when installing Anaconda
Uncheck both options when installing Anaconda

Briefly, I got a message saying Anaconda installed successfully.

Anaconda Installation Successful
Anaconda Installation Successful

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.

Anaconda Navigator Doesn't Run
Anaconda Navigator Doesn’t Run

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

Anaconda Prompt Works
Anaconda Prompt Works

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.

Conda update failed
Conda update failed

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:

pywin32 version 304
pywin32 version 304

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!

Enjoy Using Anaconda!
Enjoy Using Anaconda!

Additional Resources

pip is not recognized – How to fix it?

2 comments

  1. Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement pywin32==288 (from versions: 302, 303, 304, 305)

    Not working at all with the pywin32==288 how do i fix this

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