android studio emulator won't start/show up

Issue

I'm new to Android/Kotlin programming (not to programming in general) and I'm following the Kotlin Basics course on developer.android.com. The very first lesson after having installed Android Studio is to create a Virtual Device and run an extremely basic app on it.

However I can't get the emulator to work. The very first time I tried, it opened a small window with a progress bar but it became unresponsive at around 1/4 progress and I had to eventually kill it. Since then it just won't start/open.

After I click run, the code compiles and the Event Log within Android Studio says Executing tasks[...] then Gradle build finished[...] and that's it. Nothing happens beyond that and the Emulator window says "No emulators are currently running".

However:

• Some emulator-related processes have been started. Those processes stay alive even after closing Android Studio..
• If I try to start the AVD from within the device manager, I get an error message that the device is already running
• I am unable to delete these .lock files without killing the aforementioned processes

What I could find:

• The Windows Event Viewer shows an Application Error
• The Android Studio log file also shows an Error

I don't know what to do with either of these messages, though

What I tried

• Killing the emulator processes, removing the *.lock files and trying again.
• Creating a different AVD (different device, different version of Android)
• Completely reinstalling Android Studio and the SDK following the accepted answer to this question: How to completely uninstall Android Studio from windows(v10)?.

None of this had any effect.

I'm running Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1 Patch 4) on Windows 10 Pro (10.0.19042 Build 19042). I am able to run the app on my actual phone but down the line I would like to be able to test apps on different types of devices or without having to always use my physical one.

All help would be greatly appreciated.

Solution

By running and emulator.exe command in a command prompt, I was able to see yet another error message, the same one as in this post: emulator: incompatible HAX module version 3 requirs minimum version 4, and the answer to that post from user Harold Sota (as well as the comment under it from Harun, more specific to my situation) solved the issue.

Answered By - user2877959