Premiere Pro crashes at start even after new install

The detail that matters most here is that a new macOS user account behaves differently. That single fact rules out almost everything you've already tried, because none of it — reset preferences, reinstall, Creative Cloud Cleaner, media cache deletion — touches anything that's actually scoped to a macOS user account outside the app's own sandboxed folders. So the corruption isn't in Premiere. It's in something your user account is holding onto that a fresh account doesn't have yet.

Three places that fits:

Adobe's per-user local database, not the app prefs. Reset Preferences inside Premiere only touches the visible settings layer. It doesn't touch ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Premiere Pro/[version]/*.db — the local project/media index Premiere builds per user. If this index gets corrupted, new project creation can hang indefinitely because Premiere is stalling trying to register against a broken database, not because anything's wrong with your actual project files.

macOS TCC permission state tied to your user, not the app. Tahoe has been inconsistent about carrying over stale permission grants across reinstalls, especially Full Disk Access and Files & Folders entries that reference the old app signature. A new user account has no TCC history for Premiere at all, which is why it launches clean. Reset it for your original account with tccutil reset All com.adobe.PremierePro.[version], then relaunch and re-grant from scratch.

CoreSync / Adobe Fonts service state. This runs per-user and can get stuck mid-sync in a way that blocks Premiere during load (it waits on font resolution before finishing project open). A new account has no sync history, so it never hits the stall. Quit CoreSync and delete ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync in your original account.

Fastest way to confirm without risking anything: copy your project files and media over to the working new account first and open them there. Project files and media aren't touched by any of this — they're just files sitting on disk. If they open clean on the new account, you've confirmed it's user-state corruption and not a project problem, and you can either work from there or go strip the folders above from your original profile one at a time.

Worth flagging separately: Premiere Pro 2026 won't let you downgrade a project back to an earlier version once it's been opened in 2026, so don't reach for an older Premiere install as a test step here.

Hey Kyra,

Thanks for the detailed troubleshooting.

The fact that Premiere behaves differently in a newly created macOS user account suggests this may be related to user-specific preferences, cached data, or third-party plug-ins rather than the Premiere installation itself.

As a next step, could you try launching Premiere while holding Shift? In the Reset Options dialog, select:

• Disable third-party plug-ins

• Reset app preferences (this will reset any custom preference settings and UI customizations to their defaults)

• Clear the media cache

Then let us know if you're able to create a new project, and whether the behavior changes.

Thanks,
Kevin