Lightroom 14.2 Crashes on MacOS with Photos stored on NAS - resolved by optimizing catalog

I just updated to LrC 14.2 on MacOS 15.3.1 MacBookPro M4 Pro and it was consistently crashing on every launch - hang with spinning beach ball and shows unresponsive in activity monitor. Happens right after the library screen appears. Lr (cloud) was launching successfully the whole time and syncing just fine, so ruled out a sync issue.

Here's what I discovered if it helps anyone, because it seemed this was happening at the point where LrC usually accesses the external NAS (connected via SMB) for photo originals:

1. Revert back to LrC 14.1.1 -> Successful launch

2. Reset Presets and update to 14.2 again -> failure, crash on launch

2a. Launch in Rosetta mode -> failure, crash on launch 

2b. Completely uninstall (Adobe CC cleaner) and reinstall 14.2 -> failure, crash on launch

3. Update to 14.2 again, dismount NAS drive where photo originals are stored (Catalog is of course on main HD) before launching -> Success

4. as with #3, but mount NAS after successful launch of 14.2 -> Success

The problem seemed to be with LrC accessing the photo originals on my NAS on launch. Assuming (hoping) this was a catalog issue, I did a File->Optimize catalog and all is well, I can now launch on 14.2 with NAS mounted.

In case this happens to anyone else....