I have office communicator 2005 running on my XP SP2 windows. Today I have faced one issue with the communicator. When I launched the communicator from Start menu -> All programs, it did not open. No window popped up, no error message and no icon in the system tray.
I tried it from command prompt by running the command ‘start communicator‘ but it did not make any difference. I tried multiple times but there was no luck
Then I checked task manager. It was not showing communicator in the applications tab. Then I checked processes tab and it was showing communicator process(Sorting the list based on image name would help find it quickly). But actually there was no communicator window open or no icon in the system tray. I killed it by right click and then clicking on ‘End process‘
After this I launched communicator again and the above seems to have done the trick. It started successfully this time.
You can try the same if you are seeing this issue. Some times the process may not get killed from task manager. You can try command line in that case. First find the process id of the communicator by running the command ‘tasklist | findstr /C:”communicator“‘ and then run the command ‘taskkill /PID processid‘.
The actual root cause seems to be that communicator did not terminate properly when it exited the last time, and when we start communicator again, it does not start because there’s already one process running.