The VideoLAN Forums

hi guys, i have an issue where i try and open preferences and it just greys out the options bar, media/playback etc and wont do anything not even change track, it does it when nothing is playing also, i have to close it in the tray icon or task manager, windows 10 x64, everything else seems ok, goom etc just when i try to open preferences, with keyboard shortcut or from menu.
any help appreciated,

Download a fresh copy of vlc and run it over the top of the installation you have now: https://www.videolan.org/

hi Hitchhiker, thanks for the reply, tried but no joy,
also just tried a legacy version that works fine on my laptop with windows 7 and same issue, wondering if it is a windows thing, up to date windows 10 x64,

hi Hitchhiker, thanks for the reply, tried but no joy,
also just tried a legacy version that works fine on my laptop with windows 7 and same issue, wondering if it is a windows thing, up to date windows 10 x64,

Could well be the case that the Windows 10 Component Store is corrupted. To check, do the following.

Open a elevated command prompt and copy/paste the following command and hit Enter.
When it terminates you'll see the results which will be similar to those in the screenshot. If corruption has occured you'll be prompted to run a cleanup. To do that copy/ paste the following command and hit Enter.
(click to enlarge)

i try and open preferences and it just greys out the options bar, media/playback etc and wont do anything not even change track, it does it when nothing is playing also, i have to close it in the tray icon or task manager

The preferences window is a modal window so yes, when it's open the main window is not accessible and is greyed out.
If you don't see the preferences window then maybe it went out of visible screen for some reason. In this case, reset the preferences and try again:
https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:ResetPrefs

thanks for the replies, i was running the cleanup in command prompt, it seemed to be stuck on 10% and i got bored so while i was waiting i started the various deleting preferences, did the 3rd one physically removing the vlc folder from the appdata folder and when i tried after that it had worked, although i saw on the other monitor that while i was deleting the folder the cleanup had finished at the same time :/ , so while i think it was probably the folder deletion i am not 100% sure, i know dumbass right just happy i can get the preferences again, been over a year , so a BIG THANKS to Hitchhiker and Lotesdelere