PRO TOOLS 8LE was working on windows 8, stopped working after 8.1 update...

[Jon Vandenbor]

Hey! I really need help here...I built a new computer less than a year ago with windows 8, installed LE8 through a thorough and careful process suggested by a website (which i cannot find anymore), and it worked fine. The ONLY hiccup it had was sometimes when I clicked the application icon to launch, it wouldn't launch until I did something like press CTRL+ALT+DELETE, then it would launch for some reason.

Then, one day, without my consent, windows just forced me to update windows to 8.1 (even though I'd purposely been NOT updating to 8.1), and just restarted my system. Windows says this update is supposed to not affect anything and that it will leave a minimal footprint. This update has actually caused SO many issues with my system since its installation, chief among them being that ProTools no longer works... I have a 003 rack and now when I click ProTools to run, the hourglass shows up for a moment and then nothing. If you check the system processes, it shows up in there but nowhere else. Alt+tab doesn't bring it up either. So I did some research and someone else ended up solving this issue by clearing the computers registry. This did nothing for me. So, then I tried to just run the 8.0.5 updater and tried to repair the installation. It would run, but then upon restart I get this black screen and what looks like a CMD console (I can't type anything), and a ProTools notification window saying "Registering digiMIDIservices". I tried to let it there for a while, like 30 minutes, nothing changed. So I had to CTRL+ALT+DELETE to end the process. Protools still doesnt launch. I figured I would try reinstalling, but THEN, it would get hung on "UNregistering digiMIDIservices". Oddly enough, when I clicked the "x" to close the window, it froze for a minute then seemed to get unstuck when I did that, so when it asked me if I wanted to cancel (un)installation, I said "no" and it finished uninstalling. So I figured I would try this when installing...no luck... PLEASE help me, this is driving me absolutely crazy. If it weren't for being forced to update to stupid 8.1, I would be sailing... Also, I have tried to run it in compatibility for windows 8, and every other compatibility mode available as well, to no avail. Also, when I tried cancelling the window for "registering digiMIDIservices" on my actual reinstallation, it came up with some PACE error. Don't know if I should try manually installing PACE. I think that's what I did when I first loaded ProTools a year ago, but I looked online now and cannot find anything to download for PACE. Please HELP!