PoE not getting past launcher - solved - error 51

TLDR: The Launcher blinks and nothing happens.


Yesterday I exited the game via Alt-F4 (frustrated by another death in tha lab due to Flame Dash not working properly in the arena) and also Alt-F4 my PC going to bed.
The reason why I mention this is, because it took about 3 times as long as usual for the PC to shut down, like an application could not simply be terminated. The screens were already turned off, so I have no further information.

This morning, the PoE launcher just blinked up, with 1/3 of a loading bar appearing and terminated. I waited, but no title screen ever appeared.

I tried again multiple times, nothing happened.

I opened the file location and tried all 3 launcher applications with and without 'run as administrator'.

I got the error: cannot create mutex - I checked that and saw that PoE now had at least one entry in the task manager with about 480 MB.

I terminated all and ran packcheck, which cleared.

Tried again, still nothing happens.

The Windows event manager shows no events anywhere, like nothing ever
happened.

The Last thing I did was to run the troubleshooter via the task manager and after 'testing the program' it just flatly stated: 'program incompatible' and my brain just went ???????????????????????????

I have tried other games, steam etc. everything works fine and as can be witnessed I am online 8)

So here I am. Any suggestions ?


Edit:

I did a log comparison between past launches and found the error code 51 related to sound problems.
I found this thread https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3230131 and was able to resolve the problem.

Hope anyone with similar problems will be helped by this.

Cheers