Unable to Launch WoW Classic because of a Paused Update?

[Burn-drenden]

Attempting to start WoW Classic Era gives me the error:

An updated version of World of Warcraft is available. Please launch the Battle.net app to download the update.

Of course, Battle.net launcher is acting like everything’s normal, no updates or anything. I did a bit of poking around and discovered a paused World of Warcraft Classic in the launcher’s download manager. It’s stuck at 0% and is “paused” - it will not start the download if I hit the “Start all” button in the download manager.

So I’m effectively locked out because of a ghost update that won’t start even after a restart, restarting the battle.net launcher. Nice.

Any help is appreciated.

EDIT: Screenshot of the issue - https://imgur.com/a/CbI4pmn
Here, you can see that the launcher doesn’t seem to realize that there’s a paused update but still has one in the download manager that seems to be holding things up.

EDIT 2: Attempting to launch the game manually from the game folder spits out the same error and refuses to launch. Interestingly, every time the error shows up, the launcher refreshes and puts me back at the normal WoW tab.

EDIT 3: Killing the Battle.net Update Agent in the task manager seems to get the Battle.net launcher to try and start the update in the download manager with "Initializing… " but then immediately pauses and stays at 0%. How disappointing, back to square one.

[Burn-drenden]

Not sure what to do now, short of nuking my WoW installations. Which is something I’d much rather not do.

[Moused-cairne (Moused)]

I too have that same bloody download trying to download and I paused …I had to reinstall my Bnet app and WoW SL but haven’t installed any other games…this whole freaking mess with the Bnet app needs to be bloody fixed now …not next week or whenever…this company is a shell of what it use to be anymore now.

[Zungar-silver-hand (Zungar)]

If you haven’t rebooted, try that first.

[Burn-drenden]

No dice. It gets hung up on an imaginary download anyway.

[Burn-drenden]

Accidentally discovered a solution of sorts. May not apply to all other people suffering from the same issue but…

I was looking at the task manager and noticed a “World of Warcraft” background process was present, despite the game itself not being actually open and running. I killed that task and the stuck update download was able to proceed as normally.

I didn’t notice the process because I had the processes in alphabetic order so the “World of Warcraft” background process was way at the bottom of the list of processes.

I’m back in-game now. Salty af over the stupidity but I’m glad it’s over with.

[Modes-blackhand]

This worked for retail as well. Thanks for the post!