Problem

My PHPStorm does not start anymore, just sitting idle without any window (windows 10)

First try: running without 3rd party plugins

Locate your Intellij (or IntelliJ based IDE) executable. If you are using Jetbrain’s toolbox go the bugged IDE' s Settings page inside toolbox, expand Configuration and you should see something like

C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\Toolbox\apps\PhpStorm\ch-0

Now open a terminal/windows cmd etc. and run

C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\Toolbox\apps\PhpStorm\ch-0\phpstorm64.exe disableNonBundledPlugins

If you are lucky and your IDE starts disable all potentially offending 3rd party plugins and re-enable them one by one.

Sadly I wasn’t so lucky this time…

Solution

After checking the logs (%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%/AppData/Local/Jetbrains/PhpStorm2021.2/log/idea.log) I found an error at the end of the log file.

java.net.BindException: Address already in use: bind

somewhere in Netty, a common java server framework which is used inside IntelliJ for internal communication.

As it turned out it tries to open a port between 6942 and 6991. Somehow no port was free anymore as there seems problem with releasing ports with winnat as suggested in a docker bug report.

If you encounter this problem you have to run following commands in an administrator elevated terminal

net stop winnat
net start winnat

or as an alternative

netsh winsock reset

if you don’t mind restarting your computer.