Blender stopped starting. At a loss...

I’ve been experimenting with blender for a year or so as a hobby. Today it stopped working and I cannot figure out why.

Windows 7 64bit. Blender .69.

When I click the short cut, the cmd window appears very briefly and then disappears. Nothing else happens.

I updated to NVidia’s latest drivers recently, 335.23. However, I can’t find any information on a conflict with that driver. I can’t recall whether I ran blender after I updated.

I ran blender from the command prompt using -d and got

C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation>blender.exe -d
Blender 2.69 (sub 0)
Build: 2013-10-30 16:56:38 Windows:64bit Release
argv[0] = blender.exe
argv[1] = -d
read file
Version 267 sub 1 svn r0

ordered
OBCube
OBLamp
OBCamera
Writing: /tmp/\blender.crash.txt

Blender.crash.txt has the following:

Blender 2.69 (sub 0), Revision: 60995

any insight is welcome at this point. I’ve been fighting with this for several hours now.

Try dragging and dropping another BLEND file on to the launch icon. Maybe the default scene is corrupt?
You have scanned for virus right?

Otherwise try pulling down a new version from Buildbot or Graphicall.org.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Unfortunately, neither of those solutions has helped.

I have tried uninstalling, deleting the blender folders in Program Files and the AppData and reinstalling. I have tried this both with the anti-virus on and off. I have scanned for viruses. Still no luck.

I’m thinking that possibly a windows update or some other application change is blocking Blender from starting up. No other application seems to be affected though.

So I solved the problem completely by accident.

Of all things, changing my default sound playback device solved it. I had swapped my playback device in order to play sound through my speakers for something. This meant that I had 2 “default” devices for sound playback. I went to play a game recently and discovered that it wouldn’t play sound (although watching videos with Chrome on youtube was fine). I disabled one of the 2 default playback devices and then on a hunch I ran blender and it started up normally.

I should probably report that somewhere. Where should that sort of thing be reported?