stota310: On the same day I bought Painkiller Black Edition, Painkiller Overdose and Stronghold HD.

Painkiller Overdose works.

Both Stronghold and Painkiller Black Edition have the same issue. Game won't launch.
Running on Galaxy client does nothing. Play buttn goes gray for 3 seconds, then nothing. Running with game exes doesn't work. Games do not appear on processess list on task manager. With violent running (double-click 20 times) I managed to actually see "Painkiller.exe" on list of processess, but it disappeared immediately.

I need some not obvious solution or hint, because I already tried the obvious things.

I tried:
- compability modes,
- running with 1 affinity,
- checking game integrity,
- reinstalling in different locations (including desktop)
- solutions with edditing two registry values which I fund on gog troubleshooting articles
- deleting opening scenes (for Painkiller, found on a forum)
- deleting ini, config files (for Painkiller)
- reinstalling with offline installer, making sure it works on administrative priviledges
- whitelisting on antivirus (NANO Antivirus), switching off antivirus completely and reinstalling
- contacting gog support (until now 1 response with obvious hints that didn't help).

Having the same problem with two completely different games makes me think, that it is not game-related but a general issue with running an old game on Win7.

I remembe playing Stronghold on the same laptop that I have now, a few years ago from an old CD, and it worked then. I have no idea why GOG version won't run.

Can someone share some magical solution?

FulVal: This problem is caused by game explorer feature that cannot work... (servers are offline forever)

Open Regedit, go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\GameUX\ServiceLocation and change the server address contained in the "Games" chain value to 127.0.0.1 or localhost (do a backup first if you wish).

Other games are affected too

FulVal: There were other post about that

remember that windows 8/8.1, 10 & 11 don't include this feature and will works without problems

Also remember that is possible that gog Galaxy will stop working on old windows... (we don't know when)

FulVal: This problem is caused by game explorer feature that cannot work... (servers are offline forever)

Open Regedit, go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\GameUX\ServiceLocation and change the server address contained in the "Games" chain value to 127.0.0.1 or localhost (do a backup first if you wish).

Other games are affected too