Try to start up Starry Night with all the graphics layers/options turned off.
First, Try holding down "ALT-N-R" (all at the same time) when starting up. Important: you have to time it, pressing ALT-N-R only when you see "Loading Preferences" come up on the Starry Night panel. You will see "Loading Preferences" a couple seconds after you double click Starry Night to start up. After you press ALT-N-R, make sure you *hold* the keys down until the panel says "Disabling all layers". Then let go. This will open Starry Night with all graphics layers/options turned off. If Starry Night is taxing the hardware on your system, this will help minimize the demands.
Second, if Starry Night opens up, go into the File (at the top-left corner) ---> Preferences ---> OpenGL. In OpenGL, deselect *all* the OpenGL option boxes. After the OpenGL options have been deselected, you can close the preferences.
Third, along the left hand side of your screen there is a vertical bar with tabs for "Find," "Options," Skyguide," etc. Go into the "Options" tab and try selecting (check the option boxes) for "Stars," (found under the sub-menu Stars) and "Planets," (found under the sub-menu solar system). See if you can build up the data layers in Starry Night.
Finally, if ALT-N-R works, after you have deselected the OpenGL options and turned on the options for the stars and planets layers, choose "Save Current Options as Default" from the options drop-down menu. Exit Starry Night and restart the program without holding down ALT-N-R. Does it start up this time? Let me know what happens.
All of this assumes you can get Starry Night to open with the layers turned off, using "Alt-N-R". If it works we will have a much better idea about what we are dealing with <--graphics card! I think we all guess that its a graphics card issue. But, ALT-N-R will also tell us how close we are to having Starry Night up and running nonetheless.
Please let me know if this strategy allows you to start up Starry Night.
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