I appreciate all your efforts to help me! Many thanks!

A fresh install of Deluge, and still the runtime error.

Will that cure my ills, do you think? It's struggling with what had already been installed in the 2nd abortive attempt and which cannot now be uninstalled, and I think this 3rd attempt has left more bits and pieces. Argh!

Oh boy. This 2nd attempt failed during setup -- some dll error, I dunno -- so I'll try again.

I have something called "prefs.state", would that be it? It's the only thing that even resembles 'persistent.state'.

Going on faith that it is what I think, I deleted it but Deluge still will not load.

I did see that, and I have no torrents to lose as the program has never run ... but I don't know how to do that. I'm using Windows XP. I think I'm out of my depth.

do you mean unable to load without crashing or just straight unable to load? if it's the latter: http://deluge-torrent.org/faq.php#6n30 I don't understand the difference? Deluge installed with seemingly no problem, but loading the program results in the runtime error, so it has never run. I am a ca...

Installing ipv6 has had no effect for me, I still cannot get Deluge to even load.