Premiere UI Panels Freeze black and crash PC

[benjaminv8300711]

At the time of writing (01/12/2025) when I launch the newest release of Premiere Pro (25.6.2) all UI panels turn completely black and freeze briefly. Then, if I'm able to open a project and start work, Premiere is very slow and eventually crashes completely with all UI panels turning fully black and the PC becoming unresponsive, requiring a hard shutdown by holding the power key.

This is running on Windows 11 Enterprise version 24H2 OS build 26100.7171, with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and NVIDIA RTX A500 Laptop GPU. I've tried uninstalling and re-installing and the issue persists.

Steps to reproduce the problem would be to launch Premiere, open an existing project or start a new one, import some footage, create a sequence and adjust the edit points on the clip. I suspect it's a graphics driver compatability issue or something.

Rolling back my install of Premiere to 25.5 seems to have resolved the issue for now, but I'd really like this to be fixed so that I can keep up-to-date with future releases.

[Dani_V.]

Hi @benjaminv8300711, 

Welcome to the Premiere Pro forums and sorry you've been experiencing issues. Are your drivers up-to-date and using the Studio version? Any third-party plugins or panels installed? 

To clarify, do you see this behavior if you launch completely empty projects as well, or does it only occur when media is already present/imported? 

Does this happen if 'GPU accelerated UI rendering' is disabled under Preferences > General, or if 'Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling' is off for Windows? 

Sorry for the frustration,

Dani

[benjaminv8300711 · Accepted solution]

Hi Dani,

Thanks for your response - you got it immediately, it was the graphics driver.

I'm working in an enterprise setting where drivers are managed centrally by the IT team, and I think my GPU drivers had been missed off the most recent updates. Following your reply, I realised this was the case and had the IT team update my graphics driver. I've now reinstalled the most recent release of Premiere and all seems to be working smoothly again.

I think you can consider this resolved.

Thanks again,

Ben

[Dani_V.]

Thanks for the update @benjaminv8300711! Glad to hear that was the fix.