Desktop hangs on splash screen "Initializing model"

[tlaresch]

One of our Windows 2012 machines is no longer able to start Power BI Desktop  We have Power BI installed on a couple of Windows Server 2012 R2 x64 VMs with 16 GB, as well as several laptops with 8GB, and there is no problem on any besides this one Windows Server.  We have tried starting it through several versions of Desktop, including the 13-NOV-2018 release.  We have rebooted.  We have uninstalled and re-installed.  Per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-error-launching-desktop, we have tried stopping the on-premise gateway and used Run as administrator for the Desktop application, but it hangs.  We are using the x64 version of Desktop.  It should start within a few seconds, but it is unchanged after 30 minutes.

We see the splash screen with "Initializing model", and task manager shows it uses CPU (~25%) until it gets close to 200 MB in memory (the machine is at 22% overall memory usage), and then it hangs.  It is using 0% CPU, and the overall CPU is under 15%.  The splash screen remains animated 🙂 (five dots fly left to center, then fly out to right).

Any suggestions?

** updated to add missing word "no" to "no problem"; added "We have uninstalled and re-installed" **

[melimob]

I have the same issue and tried all troubleshooting advice and doesn't work.

Does anyone have an answer to this please?

[v-lili6-msft]

hi, @tlaresch

It seems rarely happen this issue. 

here is a similar issue for you refer to:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/Power-BI-Desktop-won-t-open-Stuck-on-quot-Initializing-Model...

and I think if the background didn't turn off the process or service did not start for the VM.

If it meets the minimum requirements, you may try to reinstall the system for it.

Best Regards,

Lin

[tlaresch · Accepted solution]

I resolved this issue by uninstalling and manually removing the folder c:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Desktop.

The issue seems to be that the uninstall was not removing the folder completely.

Note that when I installed after uninstall, I got this message after clicking Finish with Launch selected:

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package.  This may indicate a problem with this package.  The error code is 2753.

Lin,

Thanks for your reply.  I had re-installed it previously without success, but you inspired me to try again with uninstalling, and that seems to be the trick.  This machine has had many version of desktop, so perhaps something from long ago was confusing the new install.

Tom