After upgrading to Confluence 5.5 on Windows, the service will not start

Steps to Reproduce

1. Install Confluence 5.4.4 or below; ensuring you install as a service
2. Run through the installation process, ensure you can log into Confluence
3. Run the 5.5 installer, selecting to upgrade your 5.4.4 instance

Expected Results

• Confluence should start after the installer completes.

Actual Results

• Confluence does not start after the installer completes.
• Confluence is not running via services.msc
• Attempting to start Confluence results in the following error:

Windows could not start the Atlassian Confluence service on Local Computer.

Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified.

Solution

If you have not yet used the problematic 5.5 installer, you can use these new installers:

• Windows 32-bit
• Windows 64-bit

If you have already used the problematic 5.5 installer, you will have to apply the workaround.

Workaround

Incorrectly modifying the Windows Registry could leave your Windows computer inoperable - always ensure that you have a backup of your registry before making any changes.

1. Start -> Run -> Type "regedit.exe" and click OK
2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services and look for the key that starts with "Confluence"
   • In one instance, the key was labelled as Confluence01051465235
3. Double click the "ImagePath" value
4. In the text box, replace tomcat6.exe with tomcat7.exe. For example:

"C:\Program Files\Atlassian\Confluence\bin\tomcat6.exe" //RS//Confluence010514165235

becomes

"C:\Program Files\Atlassian\Confluence\bin\tomcat7.exe" //RS//Confluence010514165235

Attempt to restart Confluence via services.msc - it should start up correctly. Note that you may need to refresh the Services snap-in so that it picks up the new value from the registry.