Ubisoft Connect Keeps Restarting

Ubisoft Connect Keeps Restarting – What Actually Fixes It

If you are seeing Ubisoft Connect launch, close, and relaunch in a loop, the problem is almost never the game itself. It is the launcher fighting something on your system. I have walked through this exact issue dozens of times, usually late at night when someone is just trying to play Assassin's Creed or Rainbow Six Siege and the launcher refuses to settle. The most reliable fix I have found is not deleting cache folders or reinstalling the launcher. It is a race condition between the Ubisoft services and the Windows runtime that causes the launcher to crash on startup, then Windows Task Manager restarts it automatically, creating the loop. Here is what actually works. First, open Services by pressing Win+R, typing services.msc, and hitting Enter. Look for three specific services: Ubisoft Connect Service, Ubisoft Download Service, and the optional Ubisoft Locator Service. If any of these are set to Manual or Disabled, change them to Automatic and start them. This sounds backward—most guides tell you to stop services—but leaving them stopped causes the launcher to retry indefinitely and loop.

After that, open File Explorer and navigate to your Ubisoft Connect installation folder. On most systems it is C:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Ubisoft Game Launcher\. Inside that folder, delete the SaveGames, caches, and Logs folders. Not the entire launcher folder, just those three. If you delete the whole thing and reinstall, you will lose your game progress and the reinstall takes forty-five minutes or more depending on your connection. Clearing those folders usually resolves it in under five minutes. I ran into a weird edge case last month where this fix did not work initially. The user had a corrupted DLL in the C:\Windows\System32 folder—specifically a version mismatch on u3dvruntime.dll that was leftover from an old Ubisoft title. The launcher was trying to load it during initialization and crashing silently. Running sfc /scannow from an elevated Command Prompt found the corruption and replaced the file. I checked the CBS.log to confirm which DLL was failing before running the scan instead of just guessing. That alone saved maybe twenty minutes of back-and-forth troubleshooting. Another thing that catches people off guard: if you are using a dual-monitor setup with different scaling settings—one display at 100 percent and another at 150 percent—the launcher sometimes crashes on boot due to a DPI awareness bug in older versions of Ubisoft Connect. Setting the ubisoftconnect.exe file to override high DPI scaling in its Properties compatibility tab resolves it. Right-click the executable, go to Properties, Compatibility, and change the setting to Override high DPI scaling behavior, then pick Application from the dropdown.

There is also a known issue with certain third-party overlay software, particularly MSI Afterburner combined with RivaTuner. The overlay hooks into the process during launch and can cause a crash loop. Running Ubisoft Connect with the overlay disabled fixes it. You do not necessarily need to uninstall Afterburner; just disable the in-game overlay in its settings and restart the launcher. If you still cannot get it working after these steps, try installing the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable packages manually. Ubisoft Connect requires both the 2015-2022 x64 and x86 versions. If one is missing or corrupted, the launcher fails silently and loops. You can download them from Microsoft's official page. Just make sure you install both architectures even if you are running a 64-bit system. Sometimes none of this works and the launcher simply has a corrupted core component. In that case, a clean uninstall is necessary. Use the official Ubisoft uninstaller if it still launches, then delete any remaining Ubisoft folders in Program Files, ProgramData, and your AppData roaming folder. Reboot before reinstalling. A fresh install takes roughly twenty minutes for the launcher itself, but game files will need to re-downoad unless you point the installer to your existing game directory.

One more thing that helps occasionally: disabling your antivirus temporarily during installation and launch. Some endpoint protection tools flag Ubisoft's download service as suspicious due to the way it modifies game files in memory. It is not ideal long-term, but it confirms whether the antivirus is the culprit. If it is, you can add an exclusion for the Ubisoft launcher folder instead of leaving protection off entirely.