TL;DR: skip to the end for a possible solution
I've spent the past 4 days troubleshooting this. Different drivers, different video cards, sound cards, USB ports, cables, everything I could think of. I was able to consistently reproduce the issue, namely that I could use HX Edit 2.70 and Native 1.70 perfectly on my desktop, but all versions of HX Edit 2.71 / Native 1.71 and newer flat out wouldn't work on the same computer, despite working just fine on my laptop. I can confidently say it has nothing to do with the Helix device, the USB cable, or the USB port. (there are other issues that can crop up from each of those, but not THIS issue) You can identify the issue without the Helix connected at all, just from HX Edit opening with a semi-transparent background rather than black, or Native not showing anything at all when loaded. When HX Edit opens with the transparent background, you can let it sit there forever and it will stay open. Once you connect the Helix, you'll see the title bar momentarily switch from No Device Connected to the name of the Helix device, then the program vanishes.
This is what HX Edit is supposed to look like if you open it without a device connected:
And here is what it looks like with no device connected when it isn't going to work:
The trees are part of my desktop background. Both of those screen shots are taking on the exact same system, same OS install, hardware, software, drivers, etc. Same HX Edit version (2.90). The only difference is the UEFI/Bios drive order.
I stumbled on this by chance as I was testing a clean install on a different drive. This desktop has 2x stand alone Samsung 970 Evo NVME drives, (OS on one of them), a SATA Bluray drive, and 2x 6Tb SATA drives set up as a mirrored Microsoft Storage Spaces drive. When the bios detects either of those Storage Spaces connected drives before the others, HX Edit and Native won't work. As long as any other directly accessible drive is seen as Disk 0, HX Edit and Native work like they should.
And this is really easy to check: open a command prompt as Administrator and type the following commands:
DiskPart
List Disk
You should get a list of the drives in your system. Look on the left for the Disk number and make sure the list starts at Disk 0. It doesn't have to be the drive your OS is on, it just needs to show up as Disk 0 and show a status of Online. When my Storage Spaces drives are detected first, my drive numbers start at 1 or above, Drive 0 isn't listed at all, and HX Edit/Native won't work. I am able to consistently reproduce both the problem and the fix by shifting the bios drive detection order. I think what is happening is that the software does some sort of quick hardware detection at startup, and gets hung up if Disk 0 isn't online. (The emulated Storage Space drive will show up as a separate, higher Disk number) I suspect the same problem might occur when the first disk is part of a RAID.
So if DiskPart doesn't show a Disk 0 with a status of Online, go into the bios and try to re-order your drives. On my ASRock Z390, I was able to do this by just disabling both SATA controllers, restarting, then turning them back on. That shifted the NVME drives to the front of the line, with the SATA storage spaces drives at the end. (Note: this is the drive detection order, NOT the boot order) You could also try changing the physical port your drives are connected to. Or if all of your drives are part of a storage space or RAID, you could try adding another drive to the mix.
