So I've got The Enhanced Edition and have patched it. I played up to chapter 4 but lost interest in the game. I've come back to it two months later and the game won't even start up. I double click the application to start up the game but nothing happens. I've tried running it as admin and nothing happens and I've tried troubleshooting it but to no anvil. This is awfully strange considering the EE has always worked perfectly before. I can only imagine what could be wrong with it. Any ideas on how to fix this problem?

Back up you're save games and reinstall. Quickest option IMO.

Gator_man's suggestion is not bad. I wonder if perhaps you are running low on hard drive space? The Witcher takes up a lot of space with tons of save files that don't overwrite one another.

Any other big changes to your system since you last ran the game? Hardware changes? Driver updates? Something like that could be the culprit.

The the most surefire way is to just reinstall as Gator_man suggested. The saves are located in "My Documents", you should see a folder for the Witcher. They're easy to back up.

I keep seeing people say this. But my manual saves overwrite.and so do the auto-quick saves(though it keeps the last 4).

Not too sure what "auto-quick saves" means, but quick saves (pressing F5) do NOT overwrite each other.

I think he means regular good ol' autosaves. They do overwrite each other in The Witcher 1, and of course you can overwrite or delete your saves from the save menu.

Quick Saves on the other hand (F5) are indeed just new Regular Saves that don't overwrite eachother automatically.

My save files are gone. I guess there's nothing holding me to this game now. Sad really. I wanted to finish it. Surely an update to my computer system messed with the files because I'm the only person who uses this computer and I am sure as Hell that I didn't delete the saves but on the other hand, save files for other games are all perfectly intact which leads me to question The Witcher and how it may "accidentally" delete files after system updates.

But that's it. I'm not going through all of that again now anyway. I don't know whether to blame my computer for deleting the files or to blame some error with The Witcher and its' saves files not being left untouched after a system update because all my other game's save files are perfectly fine.

To be perfectly sure, use System Search function (including all hidden and system subfolders) to locate any *.TheWitcherSave files.

Windows can be strange OS sometimes. ==

Well I did get The Witcher to work the other day by opening the editor which works unlike The Witcher itself. I tested some module and then quit to main menu. In the main menu, I went to load save and there were no saves there.

There's no point me even reinstalling the game because I'm currently playing two other RPGs and don't have time to go through another run with The Witcher, especially considering that I find the game average at times. I would have loved to have finished it but I guess things must be as they present themselves.

You could just..you know...play it again. I've beaten it 3 times, and it never gets old, even if you make the same choices. The game is worth the time, imo.

Clearly, you should play whatever game you want to play. But before you write off the Witcher because the saves are apparently gone, I would at least look in the "My Documents\The Witcher" folder to be sure there are no save files there, and then follow Thiev's advice to search for the files and make sure they're not completely gone. I wouldn't be surprised if whatever is preventing the Witcher from running properly is also preventing it from seeing the save files... they could still be there.

If you find the saves, they're easy to back up in case you ever want to return and finish the game. Once you have them backed up there's nothing stopping you from uninstalling the game and trying a fresh install if you decide you want to complete the game.

If you were in Chapter IV, then you're actually fairly close to the end.

If you've lost your saves for good but want to give it another go, I have this save at the start of Chapter IV http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12140950/Witcher%20stuff/000225%20-%20Lakeside-225.TheWitcherSave

I've sided with Abigail in chapter 1, Didn't help neither the Scoia'tael nor the Order in chapter 2 and I helped Yaevinn in chapter 3. Also I completed all the trophy quests in all three chapters.

It'd really be a shame to abandon the game after you've gone so far.

This happened to me as well. I hadn't played The Witcher for many months since I installed it on my laptop. I'm running Windows 7 64bit. Last I played it, I had all the latest patches, it was working, and I had uninstalled that DRM (since patch, what, 1.4? 1.5? makes it useless anyway).

I ended up uninstalling/reinstalling The Witcher, and everything works perfectly now. However whats different in our cases is that I had my saved games backed up to an External HDD because when I was actually playing before (took a 2 yr break :D ) I was playing on a completely different laptop. When I got this one last November, I installed a few games, made sure they worked, and got side tracked with other stuff...

Sorry to hear about your saved games tho, that sucks. They SHOULD be right there. I don't understand why they'd be missing unless you had uninstalled The Witcher & it whiped all the save game data. Or you mistakenly deleted the files while cleaning up multiple folders in your My Documents folder?

Anyways, just sharing my experience incase you DO find your files, or decide to continue from Evil_Vasile's file.

Yo dawg--

I just want to add another vote for searching your entire hard drive for files ending in *.TheWitcherSave

It seems unlikely that they'd completely delete themselves without a trace.

(Side note, I recently had a similar experience with Arx Fatalis. After leaving it alone for a month, I came back to it and found I couldn't transition between areas anymore, which is obviously a game-breaker. Sucks, regardless.)