Posting this because while i’m silly and the fix was obvious, my very specific scenario might be helpful to someone else in the future.
I had swapped from Qt6 to Qt5 (Windows 10) by installing directly over the existing installation folder. This worked fine until randomly it stopped working and wouldn’t launch or appear on task manager. Launching it via command prompt gave the following error:
C:\Users____\AppData\Local\Programs\Anki>Anki starting…
Initial setup…
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in
File “aqt”, line 61, in
File “aqt.gui_hooks”, line 11, in
File “_aqt.hooks”, line 18, in
File “aqt.qt”, line 20, in
File “aqt.qt.qt6”, line 11, in
ImportError: DLL load failed while importing sip: The specified module could not be found.
Turns out installing Qt5 directly over the Qt6 version didn’t change the version correctly and Anki was launching Qt6 the whole time (probably why people say uninstall and then install… oops). Going into “Anki\lib” and deleting the PyQt6 fixed the problem. However, this would’ve been avoided if I had just not been lazy and uninstalled the old version of Anki properly.