Friday, 18 March 2016

Slack: Black screen at startup after 2.0.1 update

Slack 2.0.1 launches to a black screen and the tray icon states "Slack is starting up".

This is an issue known to Slack and thought to be caused by certain graphics cards/drivers.

To workaround:

Close any open instances of Slack
Open a command prompt (Start > Run or Windows key + R and enter cmd)
Type c: and press enter
Type cd %LocalAppData%\Slack\app-2.0.1
Press Enter
Type slack.exe --disable-gpu
Press Enter and Slack should now launch
Close the command prompt window

This process must be repeated each time Slack is launched or amend your shortcut accordingly.
Slack support advise the issue should be resolved in a future build.
Posted by Tim Salmon at 12:01
Labels: ,

10 comments:

  1. Grank22 March 2016 at 17:31

    THANK YOU FOR THIS!!!
    Slack for Windows 1.2.7 decided it wasn't going to connect any more. "Check for Updates..." claimed I had the latest version though. I was suspicious so I uninstalled it and downloaded it fresh, which brought me to 2.0.1... but that just wouldn't render properly at all and would flash blocks of black and blocks of white and scattered crosshairs and stuff. Got it to connect, but it would stutter between rendering properly and flashing to a total black screen.
    Changing my shortcut to include this switch made these problems go away. :D
    I notice that there's a "Disable hardware acceleration" checkbox in Preferences now, which likely does the same thing as the command-line switch (but doesn't do much good if someone's rendering errors are so poor that they can't really get that far, heh). It says "If you use a Windows Classic theme, this can resolve rendering issues", but I'm using the full Windows 10 experience so I'm not sure why that particular text was chosen...
    Anyway. There's nothing on the Slack support page about this, which there probably should be until this issue is resolved (seems like it might be upstream)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown14 June 2016 at 10:54

    Thank you, thank you , thank you ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous21 July 2016 at 18:24

    its hasnt been resolved yet...stupid issues

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous21 July 2016 at 18:24

    did not work for me..really annoying.

    ReplyDelete
  5. pp27 January 2017 at 14:21

    This slack issue suddenly got me - Windows 10. Slack window was blank and white. Tried uninstalling or the flag mentioned above. Didn't help. What did help in the end was clearing the cache folder. Go to "Users\\AppData\Roaming\Slack" and delete everything that is there. "AppData" folder is hidden so you'd have to show hidden files or use command line to get there. It should help. Posting it here hoping it would help someone in the future and save them some time.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unknown3 March 2017 at 19:58

      Deleting everything in the "Users\\AppData\Roaming\Slack\Cache" directory did the trick for me. Thanks for posting!

      Delete
    2. Unknown28 February 2020 at 11:55

      This worked for me too.

      Delete
    3. Unknown11 May 2021 at 03:38

      Finally a working solution. Thanks!

      Delete
  6. Anonymous6 May 2020 at 09:41

    Handy stuff in this chain but there is "Slack Folder" in my appdata/romaing! Whatsapp, dropbox etc etc are present but no Slack even whgilst I can see the Black Window on screen....Close still appears top right in the blackness.....I'm remeinded of the entally unwell painter from the Fast Show...anyone?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Unknown3 January 2022 at 15:37

    This is the only thing that's worked for me after trying multiple "fixes." Thank you so much!

    ReplyDelete

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