Test 1
Same result in both cases
Test 2
Running tor.exe from Command prompt does nothing.
torrc is empty; state.tmp contains
# Tor state file last generated on 2026-06-22 12:21:15 local time
# Other times below are in UTC
# You *do not* need to edit this file.
Dormant 0
LastWritten 2026-06-22 11:21:15
TorVersion Tor 0.4.9.9 (git-74b53bd1992da4ec)
The first test confirms that the proxy tor.exe is not up which is the cause. Task Manager demonstrates this.
Test 2 demonstrates that tor.exe exists. In my initial response I had renamed tor.exe which gave me the same result as your pop-up but we know that your tor.exe exists. When I run this same test, I get the same as you except state.tmp in mine is just state. Those files mentioned are created in users/appdata/roaming/tor. These are junk now.
I’m having a hard time simulating your situation exactly. I can’t stop an app from executing as an AV can.
When I block tor.exe from accessing the internet, on a test Win11, Tor browser just hangs and no pop-up. Test 2 demonstrates that tor.exe does start since it was able to create those files mentioned. I suspect it gets stopped somewhere and thus the problem.
Can you possibly stop those 2 AVs temporarily just to see or one at a time to see which is a problem. To me 2 AVs seems weird. The Windows AV probably gets disabled by one or both.
As a last resort I asked Duck Duck this question:
Does MalwareBytes prevent Tor Browser from running
WoW lots of replies. So try that query and see if any solution works for you.
Hi, In my case this error is due to WSL in Windows reserving a range of ports for its use (but other services may be well end doing randomly the same reserve someday), that seems to be dynamic and that in this case includes 9150 (9090–9988). Probably a restart would clear the reserve, I haven’t yet tested that. But I would like to simply tell tor to use other ports. I haven’t been able to do this using torrc, any ideas for doing this?
I’ve found how to change the ports: In my case I used 10000 and 10001 which were available. In “\Tor Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Data\Browser\PROFILE_FOLDER” (where PROFILE_FOLDER change for each user and is something like “fgfy91gz.default-1787200502920”), create a file named “user.js” with contents:
user_pref(“network.proxy.socks_port”, 10000);
user_pref(“extensions.torlauncher.control_port”, 10001);
And restart tor browser.