android studio emulator won't start/show up

Question

I'm new to Android/Kotlin programming (not to programming in general) and I'm following the Kotlin Basics course on developer.android.com. The very first lesson after having installed Android Studio is to create a Virtual Device and run an extremely basic app on it.

However I can't get the emulator to work. The very first time I tried, it opened a small window with a progress bar but it became unresponsive at around 1/4 progress and I had to eventually kill it. Since then it just won't start/open.

After I click run, the code compiles and the Event Log within Android Studio says Executing tasks[...] then Gradle build finished[...] and that's it. Nothing happens beyond that and the Emulator window says "No emulators are currently running".

However:

• Some emulator-related processes have been started. Those processes stay alive even after closing Android Studio. .
• If I try to start the AVD from within the device manager, I get an error message that the device is already running
• I am unable to delete these.lock files without killing the aforementioned processes

What I could find:

• The Windows Event Viewer shows an Application Error
• The Android Studio log file also shows an Error

I don't know what to do with either of these messages, though

What I tried

• Killing the emulator processes, removing the *.lock files and trying again.
• Creating a different AVD (different device, different version of Android)
• Completely reinstalling Android Studio and the SDK following the accepted answer to this question: How to completely uninstall Android Studio from windows(v10)? .

None of this had any effect.

I'm running Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1 Patch 4) on Windows 10 Pro (10.0.19042 Build 19042). I am able to run the app on my actual phone but down the line I would like to be able to test apps on different types of devices or without having to always use my physical one.

All help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

By running and emulator.exe command in a command prompt, I was able to see yet another error message, the same one as in this post: emulator: incompatible HAX module version 3 requirs minimum version 4 , and the answer to that post from user Harold Sota (as well as the comment under it from Harun, more specific to my situation) solved the issue.