I don't know if this is a bug in Renoise or the MIDI-driver, or if it's a missing feature. Anyway...

I have an Opcode 8 port/SE and since it's an old piece of hardware with no official XP drivers, I use this 3rd party driver.

Well, the annoyance is that I can't use Renoise with the 8 port turned off. When I travelled with my laptop only a while ago and wanted to show off Renoise to some friends I had to uninstall the 8 port driver, otherwise Renoise wouldn't start.

Maybe some "skip" button when Renoise is seaching for midi hardware would do the trick?

Are you sure it won't start or does it just take some time for Renoise to start? I have an Emagic Unitor-8 midi-interface connected to my computer and if it's turned off as I start Renoise, starting up takes like 30 seconds. Seems to be Renoise waiting for a response from the drivers and after timeout continue to load Renoise.

Also if this happens with any software which tries to access the drivers, there is nothing we could do to fix this. Have you tested this with other apps?

I don't really use other apps.

I don't think it starts, I've waited quite a while. I'll do some tests when I get a bit of time.

This isn't normal then?