I read here and in the chat, as well as on reddit and Twitter from users who don’t get the wallet started and synchronized.
Since I didn’t have this problem myself, I tried to reproduce and provoke it, and so far I found out this:
(on different Windows 8,10 and 2012Srv, always with perfectly synchronized internet time):
After installation, the Daedalus icon is located on the desktop. Double-clicking executes a batch script that first starts a local Cardano node. Furthermore, the Daedalus Wallet is executed, which connects to the local node.
You can now see the Daedalus icon in the task bar and fix it there permanently with “pin to taskbar”. Note: only the executed Daedalus.exe is fixed here and not the entire startup script. When you later start the wallet from the taskbar, there is no startup request for the node, no Windows security query and therefore the node to which the wallet tries to connect is missing. From a technical point of view, this is a relatively simple cause, that can certainly be improved in future installation routines. Until then, please make sure that you run daedalus.bat and not the exe.
I also tried to compress the DB folder with its 800.000 files, which took about an hour (NTFS file system compression). But this didn’t really work because of the many very small files. Neither the speed nor the amount of storage space actually consumed has improved significantly. I only noticed that Daedalus could not connect after the compression. Only a restart of the computer helped. So it is possible that temporarily locked files in the DB folder (e. g. Antivirus) might cause a problem. But I never had to delete parts or the entire DB folder to synchronize everything again.
I was able to reconstruct another situation on a virtualized server in a data center. SysInternals process explorer clearly shows that the cardano-node has started. It listens on port 8090 and you can Telnet there. Or you can simply open a web browser to access http://localhost:8090. The node should issue a message that it only accepts encrypted HTTPS connections. But that’s enough to realize that the node is actually active. However, ProcExplorer also showed that the node itself could not connect to the Cardano network. The connection attempts to different AmazonAWS servers on port 3000 failed (SYN_SENT) until I unlocked the port 3000 on the firewalls for these outgoing connections. A few seconds later, the waiting Daedalus began to synchronize.
So to find out if it is a network problem, you should first try to visit http://localhost:8090 in your web browser. If there is a fast response from there, it rather indicates that the local Cardano node has started, but is not connected to the Cardano network. This can effectively be caused by a firewall that allows only certain outgoing connections. Whether this is configured by your Internet access provider or your own router/firewall has to be checked on a case-by-case basis. It could also be an antivirus/security suite installed on your computer that blocks these outgoing connections.
If you want to see a few details of your own, you can download https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer and run it by right-clicking with administrator rights. With the Process Monitor you could take a much more detailed look at the activities of wallet and node. Actually, the network connection problems should be solved in this way.
Let’s see what the next release version will bring.