okay where would the config and any other files be located if blender was uninstalled?

Try C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation

Hi,
I did as you suggested and I even cleaned out some older blender files that were in the regedit. It didn't fix the problem. I did notice that the first time I started blender, the window stayed open a little longer than the second time. I do have the Windows 2008 redistributable x64 installed. My driver for the ATI radeon HD 5700 series is 8.850.0.0 dated 4/9/2011 and I checked. The updates are current. Could the problem be caused by not having python 3 installed?

No, you don't need a Python3 Installation, this is bundled with Blender.
Is there any error message in the console? (Try to launch blender.exe from the cmd).

If this doesn't give a hint, I am afraid we run out of options. Could be a problem with the 3 year old GPU driver or so..

Hi
I ran blender from the command line and it behaved like the other times. However there was a crash file made but it only had this line. "# Blender 2.69 (sub 0), Revision: 60995" not much to go on. So I thought of a couple of things to try. 1) putting blender in the path to see if my system recognizes it or 2) download blender source code and recompile on my system to see if there are other errors.

Hi,
I tried adding blender to my path but that didn't work. So I deleted blender 2.69 - 64 bit and installed blender 2.69 - 32 bit using the windows installer. So there seems to be something wrong with the 2.69 - 64 bit exe