A few days after upgrading to Qlik Sense Desktop 3.0 SR1 I found that Sense was not running when clicking on it’s icon on the Taskbar. A task was starting, but no UI was appearing. I even tried re-installing without joy. The solution in the end was simple – but not at all obvious.

The Symptom

The first time of starting Sense 3.0 SR1 everything worked fine. All of my apps from the previous version were present and correct and opened without error. Using the standard Windows 10 functionality I duly right clicked on the taskbar icon and created a pinned version.

It was a day or so later that I came to click on the Sense icon on the Taskbar, where I tend to start most apps from, and very little happened. Looking on the Task Manager I could see that an instance of QlikSenseBrowser.exe had started, but this was not actually doing anything. Each subsequent click on the icon launched another of these processes – but they all just sat there with no UI showing.

QlikSenseBrowser.exe

I tried a repair of Qlik Sense Desktop and a re-install, after renaming the Sense folder under C:\Users\steve\Documents\Qlik. Neither made any difference.

Qlik Sense Desktop Repair

So, What Is Going On?

After looking around on Qlik Community for a bit, I came across this thread (https://community.qlik.com/thread/223156) that mentioned the two different EXE files that exist in the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Programs\Qlik\Sense\ folder – QlikSenseBrowser.exe and QlikSense.exe. Double clicking on QlikSense.exe opened the app up fine. I then closed it and searched for Sense on the Start menu, and sure enough it loaded fine from there also.

Basically, what happens when starting QlikSense.exe is that it starts a number of processes, ending with QlikSenseBrowser.exe. It is the final process that causes an icon to appear on the Taskbar. If you pin that icon though (an obvious enough thing to do) by on clicking it you only start the QlikSenseBrowser.exe process and none of the bits that do the actual work of Sense.

As I stated in the opening paragraph – it is not at all obvious what is happening here though.

How To Fix

Once I knew what was going on it was a very simple fix. I unpinned the QlikSenseBrowser.exe icon from the Taskbar and then pinned the Sense icon from the Start Menu instead. On clicking on this from the Taskbar, Sense opened up correctly.

Interestingly, this then leaves you with two Icons on the Taskbar, the one that you start from and the one that remains when the Desktop client is running. If you start Sense from the Start menu then it is only the latter one that shows (just inviting you to pin it!). You will notice the two icons are similar, but not the same:

Qlik Sense Two Icons

The two icons thing was something I had noticed with previous versions, but as I had (by chance) pinned the right version it was not causing any problems.

Conclusion

Hopefully this will get resolved in a future version, as it is nothing if not counter-intuitive. In the mean time I hope that this blog post can save others from the waste of time and effort I had working out what was going on.

In short, pin Sense from the Start Menu, not the Taskbar itself.