Game suddenly won't start anymore

Yep. Hurray.

Well, it's like this. Yesterday, was just another ordinary day, so I felt like playing some GW, like I do on most ordinary days. Well, it started up, the download thing came up, it downloaded something real quick then restarted, and started downloading again. Only this time, the "bar" for the progress was much thinner and IIRC, the percentage done wasn't shown anymore. It looked like they'd changed it for cosmetic reasons. Anyway, the bar fills up and then, bam, an error message. It said GW can't write to the hard drive, that I should get administrative rights, etc, etc. Of course nothing's wrong with my drive, it's kickass, and the game has worked fine since I got it in may.

I tried mailing Anet about it, they gave me a reply I laughed a bit at, they advised me to actually UNINSTALL/REINSTALL! LOL! There's no way in *hell* I'm doing that on dial-up. I'll be stuck downloading for... I dunno, several days!

Give this a try.
Copy your gw.dat file. Delete Gw.exe and reinstall (don't uninstall), if all goes well it will fix gw.exe and keep the existing gw.dat file. If it doesn't, you still have it backed up. Now if the glitch is in the gw.dat file... are you planning to buy a physical copy of factions?

Could also try altering the short cut with -repair and see if that works too.