A couple of days ago, my Kindle for PC app started misbehaving and wouldn’t open books. As you can imagine, my happiness level wasn’t high.
There’s a Check for Problems option in the Help menu but it kept coming back saying the program was ok, which it obviously wasn’t. In the end I decided to uninstall and do a fresh install.
And that’s when the trouble started.
The fresh install kept failing. I tried running it directly from the Amazon site and by downloading the installer and running it as an administrator, yet I kept getting the same application error:
Faulting application name: Kindle.exe, version: 1.25.1.52064, time stamp: 0x5c01f6cf
Faulting module name: MSVCR120.dll, version: 12.0.21005.1, time stamp: 0x524f7ce6
Exception code: 0x40000015
Fault offset: 0x000a7676
Faulting process id: 0x1958
Faulting application start time: 0x01d4a11ff0a001eb
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Amazon\Kindle\Kindle.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Amazon\Kindle\MSVCR120.dll
Report Id: 49a12a86-0d13-11e9-ab1f-c86000ce55fe
After a solid day of trying to install it (was it caused by .net corruption? was there a problem with the installer?) and many fruitless hours scanning various developers’ forums trying to work out just why MSVCR120.dll was failing, I finally found a 2011 post from by Richard Siddaway on his blog which pointed me in the right direction.
Richard was walking through what he did with his XP build (well, it was 2011!) and he mentioned having to search through various folders to find instances of the Kindle. So I went searching and yes, I had a plethora of Kindle apps installed in various folders, none of them would load but they were still there with their dreaded MSVCR120.dll hanging around.
Thankfully each of the offending folders had an uninstall.exe, so I uninstalled each one I found and deleted any remaining files and sub folders once it had finished. When I was done, I rebooted the machine and tried again…
And it worked.
Depending on how long you’ve had versions of the Kindle for PC on your system, you’re going to find it scattered throughout your c drive. I found it in C:\Program Files (x86)\Amazon\Kindle but also full copies in the
C:\Users\[YourLoginName]\AppData\Roaming\Amazon and C:\Users\
[YourLoginName]\AppData\Local\Amazon
So if you’re stuck trying to get it to install and like me you can’t find any way to get help from Amazon, give this a try.
Once it was installed, all I had to do was go to the Tools menu and open Sync and Check for New Items to log in again and then import my collections (click on the up/down arrows beside the Collections title and chose Import).
If you need to download the latest installer, get it from the Amazon App page. You’ll find they only have one for the PC and it’s a 32bit (x86 in Microsoft parlance) application. You can either run it from there (depending on your browser set up) or download it and run it.
