Home → Troubleshooting → BigPicture → "Initialization Error: Shapes Initialization"
Applies to: BigPicture 1.x/7.x/2016
When I try to launch BigPicture, I get this error message:
Initialization Error: Shapes Initialization
Contact Palisade Technical Support for more information.
Also, when I try to launch @RISK, I get a popup that says "Initializing", but @RISK never appears in the Excel ribbon.
We have had a couple of cases like this, and the two things together have meant that the user's System Registry was corrupted, possibly by a failed or buggy uninstall of 32-bit office. After literally hours of troubleshooting in both cases, we were unable to work through all the errors in the System Registry, even with the help of a popular "registry cleaner".
Our advice, reluctantly, is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows. That's a drastic step, obviously. But with a corrupted System Registry, we expect that other problems would emerge over time, with other applications.
If you're not having problems with other applications yet, and if you have another computer available, you might want to try installing the software there, as a trial version. If the trial works properly, Palisade Technical Support can help you transfer the license to the new machine from the machine where the problem occurs.
Last edited: 2017-10-24