When starting up desktop I get a "grey screen of death"

[GunnerJ]

Any report I try and open on my machine just gives me a grey screen and I can't interact with it at all. A coworker is able to see the reports but I'm not. I have uninstalled and reinstalled. I have fully updated my machine. Still I don't see any changes. 

These are some errror messages that eventually comes up after several minutes of the grey screen. 

[v-robertq-msft]

Hi,

Where do you get the latest version of the Power BI desktop? Windows Store or the web?

If it’s from the Windows Store, I suggest you to update to the latest version of the Power BI desktop and check if this problem can disappear.

If you still have a problem and want to get a solution for this kind of starting up the problem as soon as possible, I suggest you to open a support ticket to get direct help from the technical support team of Microsoft.

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/How-to-create-a-support-ticket-in-Power-BI/ba-p/6830...

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/support/

Thank you very much!

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _Robert Qin

[gradatc]

I am having this exact same issue - is there anything that can be done to address this?

[emilplan]

Same issue here. I'm running:

PBI: 2.100.785.0

Win10: 19042.1348

Tried rebooting and reinstalling PBI (which is governed by central IT using Software Center at our firm). 

Edit: Found that the issue is also beeing tracked here:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Cannot-invoke-on-WebView2-Web-Browser-in-its-current-state/...

regards

[PaulusD]

Following this thread as i'm running into the same issue...

[Massimo_Ciscato]

I had the same problem and the following workaround solved it for me:

• Run "Edit environment variables for your account" from Windows' search box
• Add the following user environment variable:

  Variable name: "PBI_enableWebView2Preview"

  Value: "0"

[PaulusD]

@GunnerJ @emilplan 

@gradatc 

In the meantime my issue has been resolved.

We have the desktop installed on a server. It wasn't the antivirus, the firewall or any windows updates (and it wasn't the desktop installer)..

Doing a rollback of the server of one week cleared whatever was blocking it and it runs fine now.

We tried the desktop install on a different server and found it did work there. That's how we traced it back to a server error.

Another workaround that worked as a temporary fix was using power bi desktop optimized for report server. This is a different version of the desktop that did work when the normal desktop version showed the grey screen.

Hope it helps...

[MateuszBI]

To summarize:

1. Check if webview2 is installed on the server (eg. with this solution - https://support.templafy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017470437-How-to-check-for-and-install-WebView2.
2. If not either:

• Install it - 
  https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
• or force disable it with the solution given above in this topic:

Run "Edit environment variables for your account" from Windows' search box
            Add the following user environment variable:
            Variable name: "PBI_enableWebView2Preview"
            Value: "0"​

[dj70]

My practice has been to log into my machine with limited permissions and run pbi & other dev tools as admin in order to connect to my datasources correctly.  Yesterday i installed pbi feb22(x64) update (previous version was August I think) and this was my experience:

• Run as admin, never get beyond splash screen (waited about 15 minutes). Opens ok as regular user, get expected errors when trying to refresh my datasource.
• Uninstalled, deleted leftover folders & temp files. Installed prior version from Dec21. Run as admin, pop-up appears saying new version available, get past splash screen then get a grey screen which never goes away. Still ok as regular user.
• Logged out of my machine as reg user, signed back in as admin. Run as admin or otherwise now works ok. At this point I haven't added any environment variable or other heroics.
• While logged in as admin set env variable PBI_enableWebView2Preview, value 0 as suggested by people.
• Logged back in to machine as regular user, open pbi as admin ok, refreshed data ok. All good for now.

[mattio]

Not sure if this will help anyone, but I experienced this today with a dataset. 

I managed to get round it by opening the file, waiting a short moment and then clicking where the close button would be located (i.e. the top right hand side).

When I clicked this I was shown the 'do you want to save changes' pop up, I clicked yes.

Afterwards opened the file again and seem to load ok as before.

[PaulusD]

We had this happen again to us. Eventually the problem was the webview file as mentioned by @MateuszBI .