Participant

Question

Constant Illustrator crashes upon opening

Forum|Forum|9 months ago
October 13, 2025
3 replies
867 views

My Illustrator app suddenly does not work in any way. Everytime I open up the program, the app freezes upon the first click, goes unresponsive, and eventually crashes. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app, I have tried resetting the preferences, I have had a screenshare support sessions with an Adobe Agent, i've updated the drivers to my graphics card, I've tried opening in safe mode, running as administrator, and I've even tried installing previous versions of AI, none of which has gotten me any closer. Occasionally, if the program does no close after 5-10 minutes of being unresponsive, I will be able to open or create a new file and work on the program relatively unhindered, but whenever I try to save that file, it will take me another 5-10 minutes, even if the file is blank.

I also have been able to use other Adobe programs like PS and InDesign just fine without any issues. This has been solely an Illustrator issue. Any help is appreciated

Bug

Simone5C56

Participant

same with me and I can’t do the fix suggested b y Community Manager as I can’t get into preferences - I just get the spinning wheel every time I try and open the app

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @Simone5C56,

Sorry to hear you're running into this issue as well. Could you please confirm the exact version of Illustrator you're using, whether it's 30.5 or another version, along with your operating system details? Also, let me know when this started happening. Did it begin after a recent update, or has it been occurring consistently regardless of updates?

Since you're unable to access Illustrator preferences, I'd like to help isolate whether this is related to your user account or another application running on the system. Assuming you're on macOS, please try testing the issue in a new user account and also in Safe Mode using the steps in the following Apple articles:

https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/mac-help/mh15191/mac

https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/mac-help/mh21245/mac

Additionally, if you have any external drives, network drives, or cloud synced locations such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, or a NAS connected to your system, please temporarily disconnect them and test Illustrator again while working only from a local directory.

I'd also recommend trying the troubleshooting steps outlined in this article and sharing the results:
https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/video/setting-preferences-video.html

Fix Illustrator crash issues

Once you've had a chance to test, please let me know your observations and whether Illustrator behaves differently in any of these scenarios. I'll be happy to investigate further based on the results.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @mickk97138563,

Thanks for sharing all the details. It's possible that Illustrator is running into a GPU-related hang. Please try disabling GPU Performance from Preferences > Performance, then relaunch Illustrator to see if it opens and runs smoothly.

Also, could you confirm if you see the Adobe Crash Reporter dialog box when the app crashes? If yes, please submit the crash report. I checked for any existing logs under your community email address but couldn't find one. Once you've submitted the report, share the email address you used via DM, so I can locate the logs and review them. You can follow the steps here: https://adobe.ly/4haXZxg.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

M

mickk97138563Author

Participant

Hello Abhishek,

Sorry for not responding. For some unknown reason, the issue went away the next day. I didn't make any changes, and then suddenly it started working normally. That was until today, a week later, and I'm now running into the same issue all over again. I had used Illustrator intermittently throughout the week without issue, until now. I tried disabling GPU performance, and that didn't work. Also I don't get a crash report. Illustrator only crashes if I click on the screen too many times, and then I'll get a pop up to close the program. If I don't click on the screen at all, it doesn't crash, it will just take 5 minutes to create a blank file (I timed it). Once the file is open, everything in Illustrator works normally, until I try to save that file, that ends up taking around 4 minutes to save, even when blank. Not sure why it would have fixed itself, and then stopped working again.

M

mickk97138563Author

Participant

For reference, I am using Windows 11 Pro, version 26100.6584, NVIDIA RTX 5000, and AI version 29.8.2, but I've also tried 29.8.1 and 28.5.

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