Go to step 5 for my solution to skip the majority of this if you don’t feel like reading.
I’ve been using the Daedalus wallet since it was new. Surprisingly, unlike a lot of people, I never had issues with until after I purchased a new computer and restored the wallet. Using my phrase, I had no issue restoring my wallet on my new Dell Latitude 7280. (i7-6600U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Windows 7 x64)
The trouble began a couple of days later.
I generally open my wallet every day. It’s an uneventful process, However, yesterday I opened my wallet, and the blockchain wouldn’t sync up. It would get to 99.84% or 99.55% and it would actually go DOWN a fraction of a percent as I waited. I would also be hit with the network connection lost issue.
Okay. As a technician, I’ve seen weirder things on customer computers. Nothing I can’t handle. Time to troubleshoot.
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Started with System Restore. I had a restore point from a Windows Update 2 days ago back when the wallet was working. I’ve seen Windows Update brick things more often than I’d like. It actually makes me a lot of money, though. I was wrong, however, as system restore did nothing to help me. It actually made the problem worse. After the restore, when I attempted to open Daedalus, I was hit with the node error popup that I’ve been seeing around lately for others having trouble with the wallet.
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Okay. System restore didn’t work. Let’s uninstall the wallet. I’ll burn a couple of hours maybe of my time syncing back up to the blockchain from 0%. But at least it will work. The uninstall was quick and uneventful. I then restarted the computer and headed back to cardanohub to download a fresh copy of the new Daedalus. I started the installation, and I was immediately greeted with the same issues. it started syncing to the blockchain in the upper 95% area, but would never complete. It ended up at 99.85%, but started going back down ever so slowly. Network interruption errors also ensued once again. I uninstalled the wallet again at this point.
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What went wrong? I uninstalled the wallet and reinstalled it from scratch, right?
…Or did I? I’ve seen these kinds of issues before. Especially with antivirus products. Sometimes when you uninstall a piece of software, the installer doesn’t do a great job of removing all of the registry keys. cough AVG cough and apparently Daedalus, too. I fired up regedit.exe, (Please do not play around with regedit if you don’t know what you’re doing, you WILL mess up your Windows installation.) tapped F3 to begin a search of “Daedalus” and found 16 leftover registry keys. One by one, deleted, tapped F3 to search for next, delete, F3 and so on until regedit couldn’t find anything else with Daedalus in the key. Moral of the story, the Daedalus installer fails to remove leftover bits from the registry. I then restarted the computer. -
Cool. Let’s download a fresh package of Daedalus once again, and run the installer.
Oops. Same issue. Immediately met with the block syncing hanging and network errors again. Well, at this point, I’m really not sure what to do. I uninstalled YET AGAIN, I manually delete registry keys again, and restarted the computer again. -
In a last ditch effort, I created a new administrator profile on my computer, named “Test”. As the name would imply, I wanted to test something. I downloaded the Daedalus wallet on this new administrator profile and ran the installer. I was immediately greeted with 00.00% blockchain sync, and after about an hour and a half, the terms and conditions page and the ability to restore my wallet. Flawless and uneventful.
By this point, I was really tired of fighting with the Daedalus wallet on my other administrator profile. I debated having two separate password protected accounts on my computer, the one I’ve been using, and the other one just for Daedalus since it worked there, but I ultimately decided to migrate my data to the new Test account and just rename it and restore my settings. It was a good hour or so of work, but I got my data over, Chrome bookmarks, everything, and redid my settings the way I liked. With a solid state drive in my system, it all went pretty much as fast as I was willing to work. I deleted my old administrator account. Honestly, I’m confident that despite all the time spent migrating my data to a new administrator account, I spent less time than I would have continuing to try to force Daedalus to work on the old account.
What did we learn today?
-User profile corruption is more common than we think. And this is a pretty much fresh install of Windows 7 that I did just a few days prior.
-Daedalus installer fails to remove residual files and registry keys. There’s no telling how many more were left specific to that administrator profile.
-Be patient
-Daedalus still needs a bit of work.
Please try this solution, and let me know if it’s helped you out in any way.
Thanks,
Jesse