Getting Spoon.net Plugin Error: "An error occurred while launching the application"

Question

The Issue

Using the Spoon.net plugin in a Windows 7 VM (VMware Fusion 6) I am getting the following error when running any app: "An error occurred while launching the application. Please try again." To be clear the plugin itself runs fine. Firing up Safari 5, Chrome 29 or Notepad++ fails.

Supporting Information

Someone asked this question on the Spoon support forum, but it wasn't fully answered. An employee suggested to add a registry key to gather more debug information, but no solution was provided. Adding the registry key failed for me: "Invalid key name."

https://support.spoon.net/customer/portal/questions/6599000-error-occurs-an-error-occurred-while-launching-the-application-please-try-again-

Any idea how to solve?

Thanks.

Answer 1

After some back and forth with Spoon support (very helpful, btw) there are two possible solutions. As I mentioned I was running the Spoon plugin on a Virtual Machine with VMWare Fusion.

1. Change the configuration of the network adapter to use a bridged connection.

   VM Settings > Network Adapter > Bridged Networking > Select Autodetect, Ethernet or WiFi.

2. Are you running Avast Mac Security on the host operating system? If so, Avast is most likely blocking traffic to Spoon. Try adding these URLs to Avast's Web Shield exclude servers list (i.e. will never be scanned). I added each URL twice (HTTP and HTTPS) just to catch all scenarios.

   Open Avast > Preferences > Web Shield Settings > Click plus sign and add the following URLs
   

   • start.spoon.net
   • start-c.spoon.net
   • spoon.net
   • turbo.net

Option 2 is what worked for me.