Hi,
I used IPFS Desktop on win10 pro x64 daily, then I have noticed, that the daemon did not start and I was getting this error, from log:
ERROR:
2020-04-27T18:38:13.375Z error: [ipfsd] start daemon Error: multiaddr " " must start with a “/”
Maybe I have runned the ipfs-go.exe and changed the that the settings file, I am not sure.
I wasted a lot of time finding the issue, because ipfs refused to start from command prompt and that was all the error I got. Then I was almost able to run it from command prompt, but I got error:
Error: Failed to parse ‘C:\Users<USER>.ipfs/api’ file.
QUICK FIX:
delete ‘C:\Users<USER>.ipfs\api’ file, the restart ipfs daemon
SUGGESTED BUGFIX:
A better parse of file paths would definitively fix it the problem
This sounds like a bug but then you say that you had changed the configuration (probably adding a bad multiaddress among the options?).
Then it seems you had an additional problem with api file, which is created at runtime and contains the API multiaddress. It seems your file existed but did not have the right info (did this have to do with the changing of the configuration?).
How did you changed the configuration? If IPFS Desktop let you change the settings in a way that was clearly invalid (i.e. introducing spaces at the beginning of a multiaddress), I would open an issue (if it has not been reported before) in the IPFS Desktop repository so that the devs know. Maybe it can be improved.
Sorry, I should have commented on this thread with the issue I filed:
It looks like the api file was empty for some reason.