P: Opening a catalog crashes Lightroom

Beat:
The catalog name is Lightroom 3 Catalog. Ircat. The ORF is a file extension for Olympus RAW files, not sure how the name catalog file name became corrupted.
Thanks again everyone, I'm up and running.

I think this was fixed internally. I filed it after seeing the post about it a few months ago. Beat's, possibly. Or I noticed somebody else had filed it. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's fixed internally.

I sent a note to the team to handle this more gracefully. It does seem like a condition to guard against.

I've filed it as a bug 4 months ago.

Beat

Adobe: consider adding a check for this condition - doncha think?

Sorry to intervene here, Geoff. But I think we should first establish what catalog(-name) Tom has in use right now. Because I don't believe that the xxxx.ORF.lrcat would be a legitimate catalog anyway.

@Tom:
Can you please confirm what catalog(-name) you're using right now? You can see this information by selecting Edit -> Catalog Settings -> General Tab.

Thanks,
Beat

Tom, if you search for files ending in .lrcat you will find the Catalog files. There will be two (with LR closed) one xxxxxx.lrcat and one xxxxxPreviews.lrdata, these are the catalog and the previews for your files so you can see them and adjustments.
You may just be able to change the name of both the cat and preview files from xxxxxx (the funny ORF name you have) to something like tomscatalog.lrcat and tomscatalogPreviews.lrdata then double click the .lrcat file to open Lightroom.

Geoff and Beat once again thank you. I think I understand your instruction about the catalog name. I imported a few files never created a catalog to the best of my knowledge.

Thanks Tom for reporting back - that little trap has caught a few players!!
Now just Enjoy LR!!

Thanks for reporting back, glad it worked out for you. And now remember: When creating a new catalog, you want to enter a new catalog name (which will be a folder name containing a catalog of the same name) in the "Name" field. The problem you had was created by pointing to an existing .ORF file instead of entering a new name.

Beat