World of Warcraft Forum

When ever I try and install WoW, I get an error: "The program Launcher.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close." If I then click close, the launcher does nothing and the patch speed goes down to 0Kb/s. Re-trying does not help.

Can anyone help?

Sorry, for some reason WoW's Launcher program is broken for wine for now (this happened before, a while back). A workaround is to navigate through your desktops menu's to find Crossover Games' Run a Windows Command (Where this is may depend on your desktop environment; for example, Gnome would be a little different from KDE).

Once that is open, select the bottle you want to run the program in, which will be the World of Warcraft bottle. Then, for the Command line in the window, click the Browse button and navigate to Program Files > World of Warcraft and in that folder there should be a file Wow.exe. Double click it and it will automatically put it in the Command line for you. Hitting the Run button should start the game, skipping the Launcher. If this for some reason doesn't work, try logging out and then trying the above steps again; I am unsure if this will work if the Launcher is started before the above command is run.

Although, maybe I misunderstood your question. It looks like you are getting that message while installing WoW? My instructions are generally for when the Launcher breaks post-install, but I think they should still work to solve the problem.

Let us know if this works for ya 😊.

Hibba.

I'm getting errors when trying to download the latest patch. The "run wow.exe directly" workaround doesn't work in this instance because wow.exe will kick you back to the launcher to download the update. The launcher then crashes. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. 😥

Ok, I was able to fix my issue by continually relaunching Launcher.exe. Each time it would download a little bit more before erroring out and eventually the progress bar moved to "Available". After it got that far I was able to successfully launch Wow.exe.

The above might not help with your install issue, but hopefully someone will find it useful.

Thanks.

I am getting the same error I thought wow was supported???

I figured out a piece of the issue at least. Disabling peer to peer works it might have something to do with that (as mentioned above) but i also enabled download after wow quits. it might help as weill

tbruff13 wrote:

I figured out a piece of the issue at least. Disabling peer to peer
works it might have something to do with that (as mentioned above)
but i also enabled download after wow quits. it might help as weill

P2P does seems to be the issue. If you disable it you should be able to update just fine after that. I ran the BackGroundDownloader.exe, but it spit out the same error as the launcher did. So I'm assuming that the launcher is also suffering from a P2P issue.

Andrew Vivian wrote:

tbruff13 wrote:

I figured out a piece of the issue at least. Disabling
peer to peer works it might have something to do with that (as
mentioned above) but i also enabled download after wow quits. it
might help as weill

P2P does seems to be the issue. If you disable it you should be able
to update just fine after that. I ran the BackGroundDownloader.exe,
but it spit out the same error as the launcher did. So I'm assuming
that the launcher is also suffering from a P2P issue.

..../2cents worth....

....I've done a number of crossties for online games that utilize torrent style
downloading of game content (torrent P2P peer-2-peer), and in each case
where this didn't work, it was usually resolved by a native wininet.dll + winelib
override and/or some other dll that comes with IE7 (which doesn't get installed
by default with WoW) -- someone should check is such is a resolve here, but, I
wouldn't recommend installing IE7/mshtml7 into the bottle as such -- instead I would
just get a native wininet.dll and copy it to the bottle's system32 directory and
then applying the winelib override...

Cheers!

Artist Formally Known as Dot wrote:

Andrew Vivian wrote:

tbruff13 wrote:

I figured out a piece of the issue at

least. Disabling peer to peer works it might have something to do
with that (as mentioned above) but i also enabled download after
wow
quits. it might help as weill

P2P does seems to be the issue. If you disable it you should be
able
to update just fine after that. I ran the
BackGroundDownloader.exe,
but it spit out the same error as the launcher did. So I'm
assuming
that the launcher is also suffering from a P2P issue.

..../2cents worth....

....I've done a number of crossties for online games that utilize
torrent style
downloading of game content (torrent P2P peer-2-peer), and in
each case
where this didn't work, it was usually resolved by a native
wininet.dll + winelib
override and/or some other dll that comes with IE7 (which doesn't
get installed
by default with WoW) -- someone should check is such is a resolve
here, but, I
wouldn't recommend installing IE7/mshtml7 into the bottle as such --
instead I would
just get a native wininet.dll and copy it to the bottle's system32
directory and
then applying the winelib override...

Cheers!

Just tested it out. Using a native wininet.dll it updated for about 15 minutes before spitting out the same error. Before it would only last about 15-30 seconds; so that is a considerable difference. As the download only takes (on my connection) about 20 minutes it would make the process much smoother. Just relaunching it a second time after it crashed allowed it to finish the download.

Andrew Vivian wrote:

Just tested it out. Using a native wininet.dll it updated for about
15 minutes before spitting out the same error. Before it would only
last about 15-30 seconds; so that is a considerable difference. As
the download only takes (on my connection) about 20 minutes it would
make the process much smoother. Just relaunching it a second time
after it crashed allowed it to finish the download.

....m'kay, well that's something ... possibly the other dll
you might treat the same way, would be winhttp.dll ...as it's
another that often crops-up as needed for some of these 'live'
content update systems... worth a shot...

Cheers!

I have very similar problem. I can not get into the option to disable the peer to peer however. The download starts and the whole thing crashes at 860 M remaining. When I get it to go slow enough to click on the options I just get a blank white screen. I set the wininet.dll to native but the winhttp stopped the program from launching unless it was set to builtin, and then it still crashes at the 860 mark, not allowing the ability to change the download options. Any other suggestions?

Michael Spencer wrote:

I have very similar problem. I can not get into the option to
disable the peer to peer however. The download starts and the whole
thing crashes at 860 M remaining. When I get it to go slow enough to
click on the options I just get a blank white screen. I set the
wininet.dll to native but the winhttp stopped the program from
launching unless it was set to builtin, and then it still crashes at
the 860 mark, not allowing the ability to change the download
options. Any other suggestions?

...I hope you are -providing- copies of both native dlls?.
Just setting them to native without the files being present
will not obviously work...

yes they are present, and I even tried replacing the wininet.dll.