Lightroom Classic chronic crashing- Selecting Edit/Preferences

Question

Open Letter to Shantanu Narayen, President of Adobe

Dear Mr. Narayen,

I am a 5 year Adobe LR customer, that is I have paid over $3000 to use your products via the subscription service. I am not happy. Your products do not seem to undergo enough QA to release. Update after update, your product finds a new and frustrating way to crash or otherwise dissappoint its users. You know exactly what I talking about, because the internet is flooded with community forums bemoaning as much... for years. I have personally spent nearly as much time trying to keep your products running on my PC as I have using them. I am completely and utterly done with my struggles.

My latest "new" catastrophe is selecting the Preferences option from the menu, whereby I am aswered with a frozen screen.

I expect, no demand, you get your engineers to fix Lightroom, once and for all. We as a community have had it with such shoddy deliverables. I hazzard to say if I paid my subscription bill with an equal amount of failure, Adobe would no doubt cancel my subscription forthwith. I will remain an Adobe customer for one more Lightroom update, and if this and the multitude of other frustrating bugs and crashes aren't fixed, I will endeavor to become a more perfect stranger and no doubt join the sea of users abandoning your platform.
Sincerely,
Rick Warrick

Per Berntsen · Answer

This is a user forum, and 99% of the contributors here are users like yourself, so you're not talking to Adobe here.

As for your problem with crashing when going to Preferences, it may be caused by the GPU.

First of all, make sure that your graphics driver is up to date. If not, update it, then launch Lightroom and check.

If that doesn't help, try to disable the GPU. This is done in preferences, but since you can't access them, you will have to do it by editing the preferences file.

Close Lightroom, and make sure it's not running in the background (check the task manager).

With the File explorer, go to C:\Users\your user name\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences

Open the file Lightroom Classic CC 7 Preferences.agprefs in a plain text editor, like Notepad.

Close to the end of the file there is a line that says useAutoBahn = true, - change this to useAutoBahn = false,
Save and close the file. Now launch Lightroom.

See also https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/lightroom-gpu-faq.html

If this doesn't help, try deleting the preferences file, it may be corrupt.

Lightroom will create a new one on launch.

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