Solved Suddenly MS Expression Web 4 doesn't work (Win 7 too)

Yesterday (March 1) Microsoft Expression Web 4 stopped working. It crashes immediately after the original splash window opens. This happens using the free EW4 version and it happens using the "WebStudio_Trial" only if you apply SP2. When it happened on my Win 8 triple boot partition I went back to my Win 7 partition with the same result. Its interesting that the latest versions of EW4 work well in my Win 10 partition and Virtual Box Win 10 running in Win 8.

Therefore my assumption is that a recent Win 8 (and Win 7) update has caused this problem. Since EW4 is only on "long term" support MS may not be very interested in this problem. I find EW4 is an excellent free super code editor for website development and would hate to have to find an alternative. I found this page with suggested fixes but they didn't work Causes for Expression Web Crashing - Ruminations from the Expression Web support team - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

My work-around is to use the WebStudio trial version of EW4 without SP2. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I just checked mine on Win7 and didn't see a problem. I haven't put it on Win8.1 yet. I would wonder if the Folder it opens in has been changed, moved or deleted. Mine is C:\Users\Berton\Documents\My Web Sites\MyDomain.com\WWW\

EW4 without SP2 works fine as does EW3. Removing the whole folder with all the websites makes no difference. Both those versions open fine and one could browse for the moved folder or start a new one. However, having removed the folder will all the web sites EW4 with SP2 still crashes on startup so the problem is something more major. I expect the only "fix" is to refresh the whole installation which is a real pain.

I didn't show any SP on my Expression Web 4 so went looking, turns out I have version 4.0.1460.0 and all I found for SP2 was it should be version 4.0.1303.0 SP2. Apparently mine is a newer version, probably when MS went to the free version. I did find that SuperPreview on mine has a problem.

Problem Solved! But this is very strange. Some of the features of the "trial" version without SP2 stopped working so once again I tried uninstalling and reinstalling that version and that didn't help. So I tried installing the free version again and same problem. I was looking at all the files in the Program Files folder and decided to run the .exe As Administrator. Wow it worked. It also starts properly from the desktop icon. I have no idea why that fixed the problem but I' smiling