Son seeker

A practical suggestion that could prevent others from experiencing the same installation problems I had: in the system requirements for e-Sword version 13 on Windows systems include having Windows Media Player installed and activated.

Issue solved!

Rick found the source of the problem, at least for my setup:

e-Sword (even version 12) uses the legacy Windows Media Player to access audio sermons and Bibles. If the WMPlayer is not installed and activated on your PC then version 13 will not run.

In Windows 10 Settings under "Apps"/"Apps and features" you can see if the Windows Media Player is installed on your system. But it must also be activated. Example: On my PC it was listed under "additional features" as an "installed feature", yet was not activated. I had to use the Windows Key + R to open "Run" and input "optionalfeatures" to open the window allowing me to activate the WMPlayer. (See attached graphic.)

After that version 13 installed and ran correctly.

I hope this helps those few who had a similar problem.

And many thanks to Rick for going the "extra mile" with me to solve this issue.

Try right clicking the program icon and selecting "Run As Administrator" 

Made no difference.

I just installed version 13 for the 4th time and it still does not run.

Waiting for an update . . .

My suggestion: anyone installing version 13 should first back up their copy of version 12.2 just to be safe.

Suggestion. Try a "restart", which will force the PC to reinitialize the information in memory. After the 20H2 updates [applicable between October 2020 to March 2021], which were updated during end of March 2021, there were various changes in Microsoft updates, and security changes, and some settings from the Control Panel were moved to Microsoft Windows Settings; which they have repaired, and the PC needs to have Windows Update re-run. Note that, after a "restart", it is necessary to ask for Windows Update three times, sequentially, with nothing more found needing update, in order for the PC to check certain requirements.

That's the first thing I did when version 13 didn't run, but it made no difference.

I'm pretty sure the problem is not with the setup on my PC, but with the new version itself. The same thing happened with the initial release of version 12.x which required an update later to fix the issue.

I expect that others will report similar problems, and within time we'll have a version 13.01 to solve it.

Please contact Rick Meyers, at https://e-sword.net/feedback.html if the new e-Sword was not loaded into your ...\e-Sword folder in your PC. Check again, if you change the name of the existing e-Sword.exe or move that file somewhere else, then, when you run the setup, and also respond to the parallel tasks of the e-Sword InstallShield, in the taskbar, then the new e-Sword should then be created. Maybe Rick's version does not over-write your previous e-sword.exe properly.

I've contacted Rick and look forward to his response.

It looks like my situation is a very rare one - no else reporting similar issues. Happy for that!