Adobe Illustrator freezes immediately whenever I open it

I am not sure if this will fix it for you, but this fixed this issue for me.

I’m using a MacBook M3 Pro, 36GB Ram, on Tahoe 26.3

I had Wacom drivers installed that were causing conflicts. They were causing Illustrator to hang up when opening trying to work with the tablet drivers. I got a illustrator crash report, copied it and saved to a txt, and then asked Gemini to read that txt to find the issue. It found the Wacom software to be the issue. I uninstalled the Wacom software using the “Wacom Tablet Utility”. Now my illustrator opens again no issues.

I simply uninstalled everything Wacom, since Wacom decided to no longer support my tablet anymore, so I don’t need any of that software myself. I hope this helps you or anyone else with this problem.

This is what I got from Gemini:

Here is exactly what indicated the issue:

• Initialization Hang: The report shows Illustrator trying to start up and getting stuck for 62.70 seconds while attempting to register touch inputs.

• Wacom Specific Functions: You can see the program calling several Wacom-specific commands right before it stops responding, specifically:

  • dvaui::ui::TouchInterface_Wacom::InitializeWacomDriver

  • WacomMTInitialize

  • CMacDriverMessageSendPort::SendWacomEvent

• The "Turnstile" Block: The most critical part is at the very end of the stack trace. It explicitly states that Illustrator is "blocked by turnstile waiting for TabletDriver". This means Illustrator sent a request to the Wacom driver and the driver never answered, causing the entire app to freeze.