This has been bugging me for months. At some point, Google Chrome just stopped working. I would double click the icon, and nothing would happen. The process would show up in task manager, but nothing would show up on the screen. I spent HOURS searching for an answer and finally gave up. Chrome was working fine on my laptop, so I just figured something got corrupted. I have been wanting to rebuild my desktop to fix the problem, but just haven’t had time.

Today, I went to launch Chrome on my laptop and nothing! I was freaking out! Not again!!! The last thing I wanted to do was rebuild my laptop. I decided to try searching again. Since it happened on both of my systems, I figured that someone else must have had the same problem. Finally, I found the answer!

Apparently, the reason Chrome wouldn’t start has something to do with DRM in Vista. I use a great program called Airfoil that lets me stream audio to several Apple Airport Express devices in my house. Airfoil has a feature called “instant hijack” that lets you re-route the audio from an app without restarting it. Apparently if that is turned on, Vista thinks you are trying to be evil. Anyway, as soon as I disabled the instant hijack Chrome started working again. Thank you, Mark, for posting the answer!

I really hate DRM!!!