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Participant
May 6, 2026
Question

InDesign is crashing as soon as I open any file or try to create a new one

  • May 6, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 18 views

I’m working on a file with ~350 pages all linking to individual TIFF files, which is typical for my work and I’ve done this before. I worked on the file last night and it opened just fine. Today I opened the file and right after I chose update links the file crashed and closed InDesign immediately. If I choose not to update links, I get the same outcome. I thought this file might be corrupted so I opened some other much smaller files, some that don’t even have any links, and they all crashed before they were able to open. Same thing happens with IDML files. Even if I choose to create an entirely new document, InDesign loads for a moment and then crashes. There is no error message when it crashes, it just closes, but when I reopen ID it asks if I want to recover the previous files (if I say yes the crash happens again). I’m loading these files locally, not from Adobe cloud. 

I’m on a deadline and have no clue what to do about this. As far as I’m aware nothing with my PC has changed since last night so I can’t figure out what caused this. I’m on InDesign version 21.3 which I’ve been using since release with no issues. I’ve reset my PC, I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled InDesign. I tried reverting to an older version, resetting preferences, and removing any plugins (I only had two and they worked fine before as well) but it’s the same result. I’m using Windows 11 version 25H2, but the last update was on April 24th so nothing between last night and this morning.

    1 reply

    leo.r
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    May 6, 2026

    Did you also try to reset caches as described here (I know you did reset preferences):

    https://www.rockymountaintraining.com/adobe-indesign-rebuilding-preferences-cache/