I like Windows Live Writer. Except for one thing: I couldn’t get it to start up on my machine at work. Beta 1 worked, but Beta 2 and Beta 3 just wouldn’t. I’d always get a UriException (not sure of the precise name anymore) thrown at some point after the splash screen.

During Beta 2, I dutifully sent the crash reports to Microsoft, and even contacted their support email address once, hoping the problem would be addressed with Beta 3.

It wasn’t. Live Writer Beta 3 still crashed on me after the splash screen.

So I started digging into why it crashed. Luckily it’s a .NET app, so Reflector came in handy. So did Deblector. I finally tracked it down to a registry key that contained a setting for a blog at work, where the HomePageUrl was a path of the form /some/path. I deleted the entire tree for that blog, and now Live Writer finally starts up properly.

The key I deleted was a subkey under this:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer\Weblogs

I think Microsoft needs to fix this before shipping the final version.