!!!!!!!!!
There's another thread already but it appears that opting out of the Steam beta program fixes this completely. First shot it opened just fine. THANK YOU FOR FINDING THIS, FRIENDS. And now to go report this on Steam.
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OKAY I see there's a couple other threads with similar issues, but I am making this thread because I am not certain they are the same issues... and disabling the Steam overlay does not help, so, still at a loss.
Basically, here's what's going on:
I was gone for a long weekend. One of the last things I did before shutting down my computer was play Spiral Knights and it worked just fine. I shut down, it was off until earlier today, and then two things: SK would crash immediately upon startup, and Chrome would fail to launch due to a side-by-side configuration problem.
I futzed with Microsoft C++ and .NET framework things, updated my Java, etc, but to fix my problem with Chrome I had to reinstall it completely. It worked fine afterwards, though, yay! BUT, Spiral Knights was not so lucky:
Anyway I go to log into SK since hey, it's been some days. It starts up normally, but the MOMENT it shows up in my taskbar, it closes out completely. There's no java.exe running anymore, Steam acts like I closed SK normally, etc.
I reinstalled it. I verified the integrity of the local game cache. I reinstalled it again! It patches just fine, but as soon as the game itself goes to start, nothin'. Same crash, same time, every time. Without fail.
Anyway I ran a System File Checker and it actually came back with a few broken files it couldn't fix. SK still won't open, so...
these are the ones that came back "unfixable"
2014-06-02 20:53:33, Info CSI 000001eb [SR] Cannot repair member file [l:24{12}]"settings.ini" of Microsoft-Windows-Sidebar, Version = 6.0.6002.18005, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_INTEL (0), Culture neutral, VersionScope = 1 nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:31bf3856ad364e35}, Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral in the store, hash mismatch
2014-06-02 20:53:33, Info CSI 000001ed [SR] Cannot repair member file [l:24{12}]"settings.ini" of Microsoft-Windows-Sidebar, Version = 6.0.6002.18005, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_INTEL (0), Culture neutral, VersionScope = 1 nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:31bf3856ad364e35}, Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral in the store, hash mismatch
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I have no idea what to do to fix them, or if they're even involved with causing SK through Steam to crash. Because the kicker here : I can play Spiral Knights in the non-Steam client just fine. The part that sucks is that my account is bound to Steam, so I'll have to start an alt to be able to play, which is fine I guessssss but man, I wanna log back onto Addy. @_@
I only brought up the Chrome thing because maybe the two are somehow related. Maybe they're not, idk. Any advice or further suggestions would be supercool, though, and if you need more info I can provide it.
Oh, hey, I just noticed there's error logs showing up in the Spiral Knights folder in Steam.
http://pastebin.com/B6PMAiBZ
That's the most recent one in its entirety.
Things I've tried since posting this as suggested by friends:
System Restore fails since apparently I DON'T HAVE A BACKUP, WHOOPS. (This computer is very janky and it's been trying to do a backup for a long time on a partition that doesn't exist and I never noticed, hahah.)
Attempted Spiral Knights Preview: crashed after patching, same crash as the regular game
Manually deleted all of the contents of the SK folder in SteamApps\Common\Spiral Knights, reinstalled, same crash (did for both SK Preview and SK)
Uninstalled both Java updates I had (I know SK worked before these updates were ever applied, too)
@__@