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As the Windows 10 1803 upgrade is rolling out for people I thought I'd share my experience with the initial (big) problems and eventual happy ending. Long and rambling maybe but it may help someone else.
Firstly, I need to preface all this with the undeniable fact that my Windows installation had had a "good innings". I couldn't actually ascertain how many years since the last full re-install but I was definitely in Trigger's Broom territory. It had started as a Windows 7 install, been upgraded though Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and then onto Windows 10 with all it's incremental upgrades. During that I had also migrated the boot drive from a classic HDD to a SSD and changed motherboard and processor (I never expected that to work but it did). I should had done a clean install years ago to be honest but as everything was working I never bothered.
However, 1803 was the straw that broke the camels back. The upgrade itself went fine, no problems during the upgrade at all and everything booted and ran fine, except Lightroom. Now as this is a photography forum it is a safe assumption that this was a major issue for me. I tried a few things myself but as the upgrade was hours old, and the LR 7.3.1 update not much older there was very little in terms of google results to help. Although I was suspecting that it was an issue with the MS VC++ run-time libraries. I tried installing the latest updates to these, alas to no benefit. Basically on startup LR was completely unable to see the VC++ runtime library and call any of its functions.
It was around 7pm and I was getting cross so I initially reached out to Adobe. This was a first for me but they followed a similar process to our IT support at work. With my permission, they remote'd into my machine and started trying to resolve the problem. A full two hours later, and after many attempts of many different things, they declared defeat and suggested I take it up with Microsoft.
Despite it being late, I managed to get MS support on live chat and they started to try and resolve the issue. With the clock well past 11pm the extremely helpful MS support assistant also declared defeat and suggested that we roll back windows and inhibit the update for now until things had matured a bit. I must say she did so very efficiently despite a couple of obstacles and eventually at around 11:45pm LR once again was running.
At this point I would just like to say that in my opinion both MS and Adobe were exemplary in their efforts to help. Considering the amount of variables involved and the time and patience they both gave to the issue I was very impressed.
A couple of days later I had confidence that the 1803 update was not in itself the issue. Other people had upgraded and weren't suffering the same problems. Given the age and mixed pedigree of my Windows install I decided to buy a new SSD to replace the (reasonably old) original boot SSD and do a fresh install. I also decided to get a new Western Digital Black 7200rpm 4TB drive to migrate my photos onto as the current 2TB was getting a bit full.
After the obligatory back-ups, the re-install of 1803 from scratch was reasonably painless (a little lengthy maybe to get all the previous apps back on). I now have Lightroom installed on my boot SSD (C: ), the catalogue and cache on a secondary SSD (D: ) and the photos on the WD Black. The happy ending is that this configuration absolutely flies, switching between modules in LR is very fast and there is virtually no lag whatsoever. A good result in the end.
Firstly, I need to preface all this with the undeniable fact that my Windows installation had had a "good innings". I couldn't actually ascertain how many years since the last full re-install but I was definitely in Trigger's Broom territory. It had started as a Windows 7 install, been upgraded though Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and then onto Windows 10 with all it's incremental upgrades. During that I had also migrated the boot drive from a classic HDD to a SSD and changed motherboard and processor (I never expected that to work but it did). I should had done a clean install years ago to be honest but as everything was working I never bothered.
However, 1803 was the straw that broke the camels back. The upgrade itself went fine, no problems during the upgrade at all and everything booted and ran fine, except Lightroom. Now as this is a photography forum it is a safe assumption that this was a major issue for me. I tried a few things myself but as the upgrade was hours old, and the LR 7.3.1 update not much older there was very little in terms of google results to help. Although I was suspecting that it was an issue with the MS VC++ run-time libraries. I tried installing the latest updates to these, alas to no benefit. Basically on startup LR was completely unable to see the VC++ runtime library and call any of its functions.
It was around 7pm and I was getting cross so I initially reached out to Adobe. This was a first for me but they followed a similar process to our IT support at work. With my permission, they remote'd into my machine and started trying to resolve the problem. A full two hours later, and after many attempts of many different things, they declared defeat and suggested I take it up with Microsoft.
Despite it being late, I managed to get MS support on live chat and they started to try and resolve the issue. With the clock well past 11pm the extremely helpful MS support assistant also declared defeat and suggested that we roll back windows and inhibit the update for now until things had matured a bit. I must say she did so very efficiently despite a couple of obstacles and eventually at around 11:45pm LR once again was running.
At this point I would just like to say that in my opinion both MS and Adobe were exemplary in their efforts to help. Considering the amount of variables involved and the time and patience they both gave to the issue I was very impressed.
A couple of days later I had confidence that the 1803 update was not in itself the issue. Other people had upgraded and weren't suffering the same problems. Given the age and mixed pedigree of my Windows install I decided to buy a new SSD to replace the (reasonably old) original boot SSD and do a fresh install. I also decided to get a new Western Digital Black 7200rpm 4TB drive to migrate my photos onto as the current 2TB was getting a bit full.
After the obligatory back-ups, the re-install of 1803 from scratch was reasonably painless (a little lengthy maybe to get all the previous apps back on). I now have Lightroom installed on my boot SSD (C: ), the catalogue and cache on a secondary SSD (D: ) and the photos on the WD Black. The happy ending is that this configuration absolutely flies, switching between modules in LR is very fast and there is virtually no lag whatsoever. A good result in the end.
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