NoMachine main UI won’t open on Windows

[skier23]

I succesfully installed NoMachine on Ubuntu. On Windows, it’s installed and running the server but the UI won’t open. I tried the nomachine app, the nomachine player exe, “show main window”, “show server status”,  in the task bar, and neither will display anything. “show transfer status”, “show whiteboard”, “show recording status” will open a gui. I checked the logs in trace.log and see an error:

  Tue Sep 16 14:00:31 2025 ------------------------   Module: C:\Program Files\NoMachine\bin\nxplayer.bin pid 5532   Thread: 2976 exception 0x6ab, 'Unknown'   In: C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll at 0x1ce9cf19   #0  0x000000001ce9cf19 KERNELBASE.dll(RaiseException) #1  0x000000001d7104f0 RPCRT4.dll(RpcRaiseException) #2  0x000000001d7104b4 RPCRT4.dll(RpcRaiseException) #3  0x000000001d7bd7d9 RPCRT4.dll(Ndr64AsyncServerCallAll) #4  0x000000001d7c05d0 RPCRT4.dll(NdrClientCall3) #5  0x000000001bb1139e wkscli.dll

Also, if I try to quit nomachine (with administrator elevation), I get: Authentication failed, NoMachine application cannot be closed.

[Britgirl]

Hi, there is a similar topic which you see here: https://forum.nomachine.com/topic/nxplayer-fails-to-open-on-win10-2#post-50834

We have never been able to find anything wrong on our side despite exchanging logs and dumps and long hours of investigation. One of our lead developers summed up what the results of analysis (from the link above): “After all our attempts to reproduce the issue and to progress in the debug through static analysis, we can certainly say that this problem is completely out of our control. A possible reason why it happens with NoMachine only (at least from what you’ve seen so far) is the sequence of DLLs loaded that badly interact with one or more configurations and third party services on your machine.”

[skier23]

Is there more debug info I could provide somewhere? This reproduces every single time for me. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled half a dozen times, run with admin, etc. I really don’t have hardly any other software running when I startup nomachine right after a fresh boot so I’d be surprised if some other software was interfering.

[Tor]

Britgirl pointed you to another post where exactly the same problem was debugged, by showing no evidences about a problem in our software. As a quick test, and a good way to confirm the issue, you can temporarily disable the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Open Control Panel, go to Programs and Features, then Turn Windows Features on or off. In the list uncheck the box next to Windows Subsystem for Linux, click OK and restart your computer. Let us know if NoMachine player starts to work correctly.

[skier23]

That did load the ui when disabled. I’m not sure I follow the logic on how this could be anything other than a NoMachine software issue though? Doesn’t this prove that NoMachine is conflicting with something when Windows subsystem for Linux is enabled? There’s no issues with my setup of wsl itself. All functionality of it works, docker, etc.

Also the fact that 3 of the other NoMachine ui elements *can* load seems to pretty strongly indicate that something on the NoMachine software side with the server status and main menu are clashing with Windows subsystem for Linux.

[Author]

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