Game crashed, now won't execute even after reboot

[Achilles97]

I'm helping a friend over the phone. He doesn't have internet access so I can't remotely access his computer. He tells me that he was playing GTA-SA and it crashed, so he just turned off the computer. The next day he boots his computer and attempts to start GTA but nothing happens. We try going into the installed directory, everything is there. He tried executing the game from the executable, not a shortcut, and nothing happens - no error message, nothing at all. Other games work just fine. By the way, this is WinXP.

What in the world could cause this and how can it be fixed? I've never seen anything like this before. I'm trying to avoid having to walk him through reinstalling the game. Actually, I'm really curious to know what is causing this. His game directory is exactly the same size as mine, so I don't think something got deleted, etc.

Any suggestions?
Thanks!

 

[DaSaint]

there could be corruption in the game files, it would give the appearance of the game being fully there in the HD but some lines of coding could be messed up in the EXE or DLL Files that run the game. odds are if he re-installs the game it will work.

 

[Gl4di4tor]

uninstall and reinstall.