Games need opening twice to start, please help

I have a problem with a laptop I've been asked to fix. The laptop (Windows 7, 6GB RAM, 1.6 GHZ AMD Quad-Core A8-3520M APU) has no malware, and everything (hardware and software) seems fine, except that when you first try to open (load) a game, you have to do it twice or the game does not open. I.e.:



1. The laptop is turned on, boots, goes to the Windows desktop, everything is fine.

2. To start, say, Unreal Tournament 2004, I double click on the game's icon.

3. Nothing happens.

4. If I then double click on the icon again, then the game loads and plays as it should.


Experimentation shows that the first time you double click on the icon, two new processes appear in the Task Manager;

rundll32.exe *32
UT2004.exe *32

but the game does not load, nor do I get any error messages, until I again double click on the icon.



It does the same for other games, such as if I try to start Morrowind, then exactly the same thing occurs; nothing at all visibly happens, no error message, no system warning beep, and the game does not load. But if I look in Task Manager then two new processes have been added;

rundll32.exe *32
Morrowind Launcher.exe *32

and the game only loads if I then double click again on the icon.

It does this with many of the games on the machine, but even so, I uninstalled Unreal Tournament 2004 and installed my copy (original!), plus the patch and extra levels, and yet it still needs opening twice before it starts up though of course it works fine on my laptop and desktop.

All of the games that have this problem on the laptop are Windows native games, and when a game does load, then it works fine, and I can't find any other problems at all. Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading, and for any advice.

 

It turns out that this isn't a 'problem', Oh no, it's a 'feature'...

Apparently it's down to Game Explorer, a 'feature' of Windows Vista onwards that, when you click on a recognised game, then Game Explorer loads in the background, counts how often you've loaded the game, and does other things, including going online to check with some database if there's a patch for the game. Oh, and if the PC is offline (which this laptop is) then the process just, er, hangs. Apparently this problem has been known about for years, Microsoft has been bombarded with requests to fix it, and have done nothing.


To quote from the first thread I list below:

Various user found fixes are listed on the 'net, but (again from the first thread I link to):

So I'm not confident that any easy fix will work. Thanks, Microsoft.



http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...ith-game/efd39c74-cfab-4c2c-b6c5-834b8849a1b3

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...-100-cpu/2b15ee2f-b56b-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...ps-using/797b227c-3dca-439b-995f-b179bac7e347

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=16883636

 

I never looked into this, thanks for posting the self-help.

 

Unfortunately, none of the solutions seem to work, at least on the laptop. Presumably one or more of the Windows' Updates deliberately 'fixed' these workarounds.

I didn't bother trying my own machines though (taking my laptop or desktop offline, seeing if the problem existed with those two, and if so trying these fixes), so for all I know, one or more of the fixes might work on some machines. If you have the same problem, then hopefully a fix will work for you, but don't count on it.