Playnite says "Playnite closed unexpectedly while starting" almost every time I start it if previous launch closed during library update

[ConcreteLlama]

Bug Description

I have noticed that Playnite fullscreen app often says "Playnite closed unexpectedly while starting" when I launch it, and it's kinda annoying when I'm trying to launch the fullscreen app with a controller (the main reason I use playnite) as I have to switch to a mouse to continue through the dialog. Clicking "No" always continues as normal with no issues.

I know roughly why this is happening - I have Playnite set to "Close" when I launch a game in order to conserve some VRAM. However, a lot of the time when I launch Playnite, I navigate to my game quickly enough that it doesn't finish its library import - specifically, "Importing Xbox Games" can be quite slow. I think if Playnite closes when it's doing a library import, it displays the message on next launch.

I understand the Xbox library import is technically an add-on, but the way Playnite handles this is quite frustrating. I think it should do some things differently:

1. Have the message dialog be more controller friendly
2. Make the "When Game Starts" > "Close" option behave more gracefully (although this could lead to Playnite never closing)
3. Maybe not display the message in this particular circumstance

To Reproduce

Either:

a) Close playnite fullscreen app while it's still updating a library (Xbox library import seems slow enough that it's easy to do)
b) Start playnite again

or

a) Set "When Game Starts" > "Close"
b) Launch a game while it's still updating a library

Diagnostics ID

5e49f860-ddc5-4189-9b40-b40e47e301a8

Screenshots

No response

[JosefNemec]

This looks to me like system issue or simply something outside of Playnite causing the issue. Because there are errors in the logs related to multi instance handling. This involves some startup checks that can potentially result in the warning message you are getting. I can't really point you to anything specific, just that Windows/.NET API methods related to this are failing outside of our control.

It could also be that there's some "zombie" Playnite process running in the background breaking this, check in task manager.

It's for sure not related to Xbox or any other library updates, because the flag that would force this warning is already cleared when library update is started.

I also tried both scenarios you provided and couldn't reproduce it myself.

Side note:

I have Playnite set to "Close" when I launch a game in order to conserve some VRAM

I don't think you are really saving anything that would make a difference. My setup is similar to yours (in terms of theme used and installed plugins), and Playnite takes under 100MB of VMRAM.