All my fences disappeared and I could not get them back - Win 10

Suggestions?

from Stardock Forums

I installed Fences a couple of days ago and set it all up on the suggestion of my husband who has been using the app for a while. Today I was trying to rearrange one of my fence boxes when all of them vanished and I was left with the shortcut icon I was trying to move still selected but nothing else. I dropped the icon and tried to open any fence but they were totally unresponsive, dead, I guess, all of my icons were gone except the one stuck on my cursor at the time of the glitch and nothing I tried would bring them back. I opened Fences and tried to reconfigure things, clicked all over my desktop to see if I had accidentally hidden things, and tried to restore the snapshot from the day before but nothing worked. I came here looking for help and found nothing so I uninstalled the app and am in the process of setting it all up again. However, now I do not trust the app and am not sure if I want to continue using it. I will give it one more go, but hopefully, you can explain to me what might have happened and how to fix it.

fences
22,893 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Please see here: https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/default_import/Knowledgebase/Article/View/456/115/my-icons-are-missing

 

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

 I had already done all of that. Remember I had it up and working for at least 24 hours. Now I am in even more trouble with it. I reinstalled it, and immediately all of my icons vanished, with the exception of about 10 for some reason. Once again I went through the settings only to be frustrated by not having my icons and knowing all the work it would be to dig them out again, for the third time. I tried to uninstall the app, it will not uninstall. Not only that now it claims to want Net framework 3.5. When I try to uninstall it the windows error is that it cannot find the app, but it is still there and doing SOMETHING to my system. I need to remove all of the parts of this app and do a clean install I think, but I can not delete it either. 

I am not new to all of this and I do know how to do things with my computer, been taking care of and maintaining a Windows system for years, in fact, so this is totally preplexing. I wish I had never installed this program in the first place, this is a total mess and frustration I do not need.

 

Object Desktop - Get all of our enhancement utilities in one suite
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top

You can try this to uninstall Fences - http://sd.stardock.com/zubaz/apps/Purge_Fences.bat

Save the file to your desktop, right click it and select "Run as Administrator" if you're on Vista/7/8/8.1/10

If you are running Windows 8/10, you may be notified that Windows is protecting your PC.  Select "More info" and then "Run anyway". 

Reboot the computer and reinstall the application.  It is important to get the most recent version of the application.

For Stardock direct purchases:

For getting your product and key, please see the following: 

https://www.stardock.com/support/productkeyretrieval

If you still are experiencing issues after re-installing Fences then please initiate a support ticket here: https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/Tickets/Submit

After receiving the auto-generated ticket number please wait for a tech support to contact you. This will keep your position in the support queue.

Unfortunately Stardock support are closed for the weekend so the earliest you can expect contact would be on Monday.

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

Could this be an issue with the new windows 10 fall creators update?

After I updated to it, I lost one of my fences, and I'm not able to get it back.

 

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

Thanks for this. I was about ready to do a system reset because my computer was unusable. Every time I tried to do anything I got the .net window. My husband showed me how to enable it from control panel and so that has stopped and I have run your removal tool but I am really afraid to reinstall. I can not figure out how my moving one icon from the right side of a fence to the left caused all of this, but that is what happened.

This was a total mess and not something I want to repeat. I just bought the software yesterday so I am sure it is the current version and I do have a license key.

Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top

Apparently, this app is not as ready for Windows 10 as you think it is. I reinstalled it yesterday and had things working and arranged nicely. It ran just fine all day and I was on my computer doing work all day until late into the night, opening and closing different programs and there were no glitches. Today, I booted only to find I had not a single icon of any kind, no quick launch links, no desktop shortcuts at all, nothing and no fences that would open either. Even the shortcuts I had not put into fences, the recycle bin and my color cop app which is an exe and not a shortcut, were gone. When I uninstalled and removed it AGAIN, for the third time, the icons were back on reboot but about half of them have lost the images, they are just showing the folded down corner blank you get when there is no image. Even in the PROGRAM folder, the exe shows like this. I uninstalled and reinstalled a bunch of them and even that did not fix this. What a horrendous headache this is! How the (insert whatever strong language you wish) can I fix this mess? Please give me a clue because I went to the trouble of uninstalling and removing the apps that were affected and any folders I could find connected to them so I was doing as clean a reinstall as I could and even that did not fix the problem. How does this happen? What did you do to my system? Please tell me how to fix this mess. I would try a system reset but I have a feeling that will not repair the damages here. At this point, I wish I had never heard of your app, your company or anything to do with you.

So, until you fix this, I am not reinstalling this app. Also, although I subscribed to this thread, I have not gotten any email notices for new posts and I have searched in my spam and trash folders. My mail is read from the Google site and not in any desktop reader so no extra filtering involved. I love the Start 10 app, it works great but Fences is in serious need of work. If you want more info on my system, please let me know and I will be glad to send you logs. My husband uses Fences and loves it but he is not on Win 10, so apparently, the version he has works well there.