How to Fix a Blank Screen at Startup (Windows)
Occasionally, some users of the Shaxpir desktop app might experience a blank screen at startup, which looks something like this:
If this happens to you, you can troubleshoot the problem by clearing out your local data cache and restarting the program. This is a simple process, but requires you to navigate into some hidden folders on your computer. If you're not comfortable doing that yourself, get in touch with us at support@shaxpir.com and we'll hop into a screen-sharing session with you and walk you through the entire process. But if you're comfortable trying it on your own, here are the steps:
Restart Your Computer
Just in case there is a phantom Shaxpir process running in the background, restarting your computer will ensure that you can get a fresh start with the application.
Clear Your Local Cache Folder
If you're on Windows, your local data cache is located in this folder:
On my Windows computer (where my username is "benji") the folder is:
The "AppData" folder is hidden by default on Windows, so if you can't see the "AppData" folder, you can click into the "View" menu, then "Show", then select "Hidden items", like this:
After that, you should be able to find the "App Data" folder, and the "Shaxpir" folder within it. Here's what it looks like on my Windows computer:
When you find the "Shaxpir" folder, just rename it to something else, like "Shaxpir-old".
After you successfully login and make sure there's nothing missing from your workspace, you can delete this folder, but for now, we'll just rename it so that the Shaxpir application can't find it during login and needs to create a fresh cache.
Restart the Shaxpir Application
The blank screen should be gone, and you should be able to login without any trouble.
Take a look around in your account, and make sure that all your recent writing is still there.
If everything looks good, and all your content is all intact, you can delete the "Shaxpir-old" folder and sink back into a your writing projects!
If something is missing…
After restarting the Shaxpir application, if you still can't login, or if anything seems to be missing from your workspace, you can create a zip file from your cache folder, and then contact us at support@shaxpir.com and we'll recover the missing data from your cache.
To create a zip file in Windows, just right-click on the "Shaxpir-old" folder, and then choose "Compress to… > ZIP File" from the context menu. This will create a zip file named "Shaxpir-old.zip".
After you create the zip file, email us for further instructions, and we'll tell you how to send us the file.
