Please try a more recent build first (like my builds which I publish on graphicall. Linked on my blog at http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b). alpha 0 had problems with paths.

Also, check my post on common problems on windows with starting blender 2.5 alpha 0. For instance, check you don't have a PYTHONPATH set (esp. older versions, like python 2.6 or so). See my blog for how to fix it.

OK, I downloaded and installed 1160_blender-2.5-r25772-win32.exe from Nathan's blog/graphicall. Blender still won't start properly. I made sure there's not PYTHONPATH variable set. Running blender.exe has no effect other than opening a command window temporarily, then shutting down. Nothing is printed at all.

I do appreciate your work on this problem.

Do you have non-ASCII characters in your path where Blender resides? (like accented chars or greek characters, etc.)

Not necissarily the problem but it's a possibility. One thing is what crashes blender for sure is if I use ASIO when opening blender. (I'm using ASIO4ALL)

Blender and asio have something agains each others when talking about sounds. Blender crashes at startup when I'm using FL studio with asio. If I start blender first and FL studio second, I can't hear anything from FL unless I switch asio off. Also wmp fails to open files when using FL with asio and if I flip the order again then FL won't play any sounds.

This is not entirely the problem with blender as every other sound emitting software seems to malfunctioning when using asio. The sounds don't seem to work with SDL either but it doesn't crash at least.

To me it seems to crash when initialization of openAL fails. Well this is something that will crash blender but I'm not sure if this helps in here though. Worth a check though I say.

How might I check to see if I have ASIO running? I used some search software, and found a few references to ASIO on my machine, but I haven't figured out if it's running.

Blaming asio was a long shot... It's not normally running. It doesn't stay on when the host program is shut down. And you should have a killer soundcard to support it via the official drivers or ASIO4All installed.

I think that if you haven't istalled any music making program and happened to be running always when you tried running blender, then it's most probably not about asio.

Win2000 is getting rather old by now. Are there others using win2000 with blender 2.5 and does it work with them or is this problem in your pc only? And you could try and run blender in safe mode and see how it behaves in there.

Correction to: "And you could try and run blender in
safe mode and see how it behaves in there."

I mean running blender while win2000 is in safe mode.

Closing this report due to lack of response. If you have more information, please reply to this report and I'll see it and possibly re-open. Thanks