Error code: 480

[Joe Hays]

All,
I have a WinXP (sp3) system with Mathematica 7.0.1 installed. I've been
using it for over a month. Last Friday "something happened" that corrupted
Mathematica. Upon launch I get the following error message:

"A serious error has occurred while Mathematica was starting up. Mathematica
will probably not function properly until this problem is resolved. You may
choose to conintue anyway, but Mathematica may crash or exit without
warning.

The installation of Mathematica may be corrupted. Contact technical support
or visit http://www.wolfram.com/support/ for more information. Error code:
480"

I did have an old inactive Mathematica 6 still installed on the machine and
inadvertently launched it. I closed version 6 and then launched version 7
and received the error above. Since then, I have uninstalled both versions,
deleted the "C:\Program Files\Wolfram\" folder and even went into the
registry and deleted all keys that had "wolfram" or "mathematica" in it.

I then rebooted and did a clean install of Mathematica 7.0.1. The first
launch of this cleaned install produced the same error.

Error code: 480 produced no results when I searched on the Wolfram support
site. As a student without *premier* support and can not call into Wolfram
support, I'm at a loss as to what to do.

Has anyone experienced this same/similar phenomenon? Anyway have an idea of
what else I should try to resolve it?

Much thanks,

Joe

[John Fultz]

The reason for the error code is not to be intentionally obscure, but because
the error is happening so early in the startup sequence that Mathematica hasn't
yet had a chance to load the text resources containing the error message. In
this case, the message is indicating that you have a syntax error in one of the
init.m files being read by the FE. The most likely source of the problem is the
file pointed to by evaluating this command (which you can evaluate in a
standalone kernel):

ToFileName[{$UserBaseDirectory, "FrontEnd"}, "init.m"]

You can rename or delete this file, and then things will probably begin working
again. If not, then you can just rename or move the directories
$UserBaseDirectory and $BaseDirectory out of the way, and that will definitely
solve the problem (once again, evaluate those variables in a standalone kernel
to see their values).

Sincerely,

John Fultz
jfu...@wolfram.com
User Interface Group
Wolfram Research, Inc.

[David Bailey]

It might be worth repeating the above procedure but also removing the
Mathematica directories inside "Documents and Settings". Using back
versions of Mathematica is a normal thing to do, and should not cause
problems - even if you launch 6.0 and 7.0 at the same time.

It would certainly help if Mathematica were a bit more informative about
what it was doing when such errors occur!

David Bailey
http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk