Solved: LRC crashing immediately on startup - and weird

I posted this question two years ago and didn’t get a useful response - reposting it here as the topic has now been closed for replies. 

two years later - with the help of ChatGPT - I finally worked out what was going on …..

the root cause:  ~/Documents was a dangling immutable symlink left behind by Dropbox Mac Backup after migration to a new Mac. Lightroom Classic failed during startup because it could not create/access the standard Documents directory (AgPathUtils.getStandardFilePath: can't create directory at /Users/eugenieshinkle/Documents).

the solution: Removed the immutable flag from the symlink (chflags -h nouchg), removed the dangling symlink, allowing macOS to recreate a normal ~/Documents directory. Lightroom then launched normally and continued to function correctly across restarts.

I’d love to know if anyone has seen this before