PRLauncher VS Windows10 (lost icone)

[WarGhost]

Hey

I'm dealing with a missing icone on a PRLauncher shortcut on the desktop:

- This is happening only with Windows10.

- My game is installed on E drive.

- Can not fix it in shortcut properties (icone change).

- First couple days after Windows10 install the icone was good.

- If i go back to windows 8.1 and create a desktop shortcut from file "E:\Project Reality BF2\mods\pr\bin\PRLauncher.exe" all is good and never happend again.

- New Windows10 installation will fix it for couple of days then the issue is back.

- Doing a copy of PRLauncher.exe file into "bin" folder will instantly remove the icone even from exe file.

- A copy of PRLauncher.exe (Kind of backup of it i made) when outside "bin" folder shows it's icone. Seems like this is happening only when the file is inside the "bin" folder.

- If i move PRLauncher.exe outside "bin" folder, the icone is back.

- The game might crash at any time (Feez) when icone is lost (Already happend) with no error dll thing message from PR (This crash is caused by something else, not the usual one from the game itself).

- Avast antivirus free version is up to date, tryed with kaspersky internet security but same happend.

- My PC specs: Mobo:MSI X79A-GD65 (8D), CPU:I7 3820 3.6Ghz LGA2011, RAM: 16Gb (4x4Gb) running on quad channel at 1866 Mhz, Vid: Nvidia GTX660Ti, Hard Drvs: 1 SSD 120 Gb (System installed on) 1 HDD 1TB, 1HDD 500GB, OS:Windows10 x64 1903, All drivers and Windows are up to date.

To conclule all this: PELauncher.exe file is being changed somehow but only when using Windows10 and only inside "bin" folder.

 Any help would be nice. Thank you.

Here is a picture showing what i'm dealing with (Follow yellow arrows):

 

 

[=VG= m823us]

So I had this similar experience, I actually had to reinstall it several times to make it work and then I found out that it made a whole new place for the icon to be.  Windows 10, for me made it so I had a "virtual drive" and that was the icon that Windows recognized for PR.  Try finding that as an option potentially.  

The other option is  type in PRLauncer.exe into search on computer and you may be surprised to find that you have more than one instance.  Sometimes Windows 10 will make a new one depending on how optimized your drives are.

PS.  I hate windows 10 for the record and still wish I was able to roll with Win 7...

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

In my experience over the past few years in Windows 10, I am unable to launch PR from a hard drive that is not the C: drive with the OS -- any shortcuts fail.  Maybe they know this now and ditch the shortcut so it isn't attempted?  I have no idea.  But I've given up and now open file explorer to the bin folder with the PRLauncher.exe and I use that, then close the explorer before it launches.  Very annoying that it cannot be a shortcut on my desktop, Start Menu, or Taskbar, but I stopped trying to give myself an aneurysm over why Win10 is so terrible. 

[WarGhost]

Thank you guys for the reply.

=VG= m823us , if this does not disturb the game then i can deal with it and take my time to figure out how to fix it later, finding where the icone is, hmmm kind a hard thing but i'll give it a try. Or maybe i can try to find whitch part of Windows have this behaviour and just disable it if possible, i'm thinking about some security stuff, don't realy know! will see.

=VG= SemlerPDX, Yes now you can put a shortcut on desktop when using Windows10.

Will let you know when/if i found a solution for this.

Take care, thanks.

[WarGhost]

8 hours ago, =VG= m823us said:

then I found out that it made a whole new place for the icon to be

You showed me a glimpse of what i should do to fix it and this leads me to create another exe file used only to take the icone from, thank you.

I copied "PRLauncher.exe" to "PRLauncher2.exe", then i open the shortcut properties and change icon of it by selecting "PRLauncher2.exe" file and voila

Let's wait couple of days and see if the icone will stay, then we can enjoy a good drink.

 

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

58 minutes ago, WarGhost said:

=VG= SemlerPDX, Yes now you can put a shortcut on desktop when using Windows10.

Roger that. Tested desktop icon shortcut and it works. 

Still, I have all desktop icons hidden, I don't use them - I use Start Menu and Taskbar shortcuts, and for the non-default /C: drive program it will not load when I pin it to Start Menu or Taskbar and that is what I had wanted to express.  When Win10 figures that out, I'll hate it just a little bit less.  (This is specific to PR, I have many program icons on Start menu that are not installed on C: drive)

[WarGhost]

1 hour ago, =VG= SemlerPDX said:

for the non-default /C: drive program it will not load when I pin it to Start Menu or Taskbar

I hope i'm not missunderstanding, so when you put a shortcut for a non-default C drive program (but running on C) it does not work. Based on that try this:

Make a shortcut on desktop and before pin it into start menu open it's properties and check the "Run at" or "Start at" field below the exe file name (Target), add/modify the path if missing or wrong, then you can pin it. Also setting "Run as administrator" can help since it's on C drive it need some elevation. Edit the game folder properties and open security tab and give full acces to your username, when prompted, check "All folders and subfolders".

(bed time, its late here, see you tomorrow).

 

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

OS is running on C: drive (Windows 10) -- PR is installed on another drive, say drive P:

Figured it was a Win10 issue otherwise I'd report it -- your checklist of things to try were run through systematically, trust me when I say we're on the same page there - trying to pin shortcuts instead of the item, and getting pushy with parameters or even batch scripts... Win10 is annoying as hell.

[WarGhost]

Well, i have good news for you:

- Open "PRLauncher.exe" folder.

- Pin "PRLauncher.exe" file to start menu.

- Open start menu and right clic on PRLauncher shortcut (It has no icone for now and it's almost at same color of the start menu background). 

- Clic on "More" and clic on "Open file location", you will be directed to a shortcut location that windows has created for start menu.

- Open that shortcut properties and add PRLauncher folder location whitch is empty when created by windows (For you it's "P:\Project Reality BF2\mods\pr\bin") 

- Last but not least, well ........... Enjoy

All this was tested and worked.

[=VG= m823us]

Glad it was working.  

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

7 hours ago, WarGhost said:

Well, i have good news for you:

- Open "PRLauncher.exe" folder.

- Pin "PRLauncher.exe" file to start menu.

- Open start menu and right clic on PRLauncher shortcut (It has no icone for now and it's almost at same color of the start menu background). 

- Clic on "More" and clic on "Open file location", you will be directed to a shortcut location that windows has created for start menu.

- Open that shortcut properties and add PRLauncher folder location whitch is empty when created by windows (For you it's "P:\Project Reality BF2\mods\pr\bin") 

- Last but not least, well ........... Enjoy

All this was tested and worked.

Same color as the Start Menu background?  Have you not seen my Win10 article? (shameless plug) ---scroll to middle "Look and Appearance" section  

 

Nice workaround!  I had not noticed that the Start In field was blank, but in my defense, I spent a total of 2 minutes 4 years ago realizing that Win10 doesn't want to play nice with the PR launcher pinned to Start Menu, so I didn't bother.

 

And, while you're workaround method works 90%, it's not complete and that is not your fault.  This is a Windows 10 issue, and/or the way PR runs in Win10, and I'm not going to keep jumping through hoops for Windows 10 and chase my tail over some icon that doesn't want to pin correctly like every other program on my computer.  Besides, I've had this all on voice control for so long, I wouldn't bother taking up space on my Start Menu anyway.

But for the record, the 10% of this workaround that doesn't work is the icon bit.  I bet I could copy the icon to some location on C: drive and jerry-rig it up to look right, but case in point, Win10 sucks and here's why I don't use the Start Menu icon to launch PR:

[WarGhost]

I'm not using start menu to run the game, i was doing it just for testing for this post.

I will look at "How to make Windows 10 look and act more like Windows 7" later.

I wont blame windows 10 on this issue cz all other programs even old ones are doing it right, except PR, according to this, my personal thought is that PR exe file needs to be improuved somehow. I mean everything else is working just fine on windows10 to me. For testing something very old, i just pined Wolfenstein 3D shortcut and it did it just fine (that game has been released at 2001).

Thank you.

 

[=VG= SemlerPDX]

45 minutes ago, WarGhost said:

I wont blame windows 10 on this issue

Suuuure.  Because in Win7, the PR icon has the exact same problem....   See what I mean?  You make very fair points, but if it was working well in XP, and in Win7, why would anyone at PR need to do anything to improve or change the way the .exe works?  I get that perhaps they did not follow a "standards and practices" method for the creation of those .exe's, and I'm not Microsoft Certified - certainly can't speak for the "how" things are supposed to be done... but the issue remains:  Worked fine in XP & Win7 -- Yet again, Win10 must have changed something that did not need to be changed for seemingly no other reason than to do something different regardless of positive/negative operation of the existing system.  Speculation, I know, but my point stands. Win10 is a pain.

[WarGhost]

48 minutes ago, =VG= SemlerPDX said:

Win10 must have changed something that did not need to be changed

Yes they did and one realy bad point for windows is that they have added "Compatibility" think for old versions of programs that is not working at all, to me they should just remove it cz it's totaly useless.

And yes win10 is a shit, a butifull shit, you can feel it's faster, more attractive, maybe more secured (not quiet sure on this one), but i agree it's a shit on a sense of PR is also quitting when it's loading next map (not all the time), this happends only on win10, soooo, i'm thinkin to go back to win8, no problems at all there, in the other hand, all other programs are running just fine, hard to make a decision.

59 minutes ago, =VG= SemlerPDX said:

but if it was working well in XP, and in Win7, why would anyone at PR need to do anything to improve or change the way the .exe works?

Let's take the first "farcry" game as an exemple: The first version was working fine on winXP and 7 but not on win8 or 10, then they released an update and the game is now working fine in all Windows versions. And the answer is people are upgrading their OS and i think PR DEVs should add a touch about this. PR BF2 1.6 is on its way to us, hope they did something about it.

 

1 hour ago, =VG= SemlerPDX said:

Speculation, I know, but my point stands. Win10 is a pain.

No man, it's not speculation it's a fact, you are absolutly right,  my final point is that i love to keep Win10, i like it but the issues with PR are so disturbing, see? i'm also addicted to the game.

[=VG= 0100011000101]

PRBF2.dll

that's the icon as an dll-file. i think that should solve the icon-problem.

 

On 4.8.2019 at 11:34 PM, WarGhost said:

On 4.8.2019 at 10:18 PM, =VG= SemlerPDX said:

but if it was working well in XP, and in Win7, why would anyone at PR need to do anything to improve or change the way the .exe works?

Let's take the first "farcry" game as an exemple: The first version was working fine on winXP and 7 but not on win8 or 10, then they released an update and the game is now working fine in all Windows versions. And the answer is people are upgrading their OS and i think PR DEVs should add a touch about this. PR BF2 1.6 is on its way to us, hope they did something about it.

 

programs constantly change their functions or are changed by code. great example is 32/64 bit versions of exe-files. the compilers are constantly renewed and backward compatibility is no longer possible...  "compatibility mode" exists for such reasons.

but I think they can not compile everthing back ... they do not have the source code of pr but still use the mod feature of bf2.

and I think in this case the problem is not the exe-file but some resource-error in windows. windows chached the icon somewhere ... and if there is a dead link or just a wrong image signed, that gives you a placeholder.... Similarly, you know these thumbs.db-files, often it makes sense to delete these because the wrong images or nothing shows up.

 

EDIT//:

ok, i should read the whole thread ^^. Sorry, had not seen that it is already solved.
well, then you have an icon on top ;p

[WarGhost]

Thank you "Binary";

20 hours ago, 0100011000101 said:

that's the icon as an dll-file. i think that should solve the icon-problem

Hmm, i should try that, did'nt know dll can contain an icone.

For now, i'm back to win8.1 cz i had some other troubles (sound trouble and game exit when loading next map sometimes), but i'll give it a try tomorrow, i can restore win10 in 10 minutes, i have a backup.

Once again thank you.

 

[=VG= 0100011000101]

4 hours ago, WarGhost said:

Hmm, i should try that, did'nt know dll can contain an icone.

ok, then have a look at \Windows\System32\moricons.dll. you will love it ;p