I’ve come across many statements of this issue, but I have yet to find a solution.
When I try to open a “User Preferences” window, Blender crashes. (It’s happening on 2.71 64-bit now, but it’s been doing this consistently for the last several versions.)
I can use the workaround of converting another window to UP. But I’m working with two monitors and would really like to be able to open an independent Blender window on my second screen.
Perhaps there are solutions that I may have missed?
Sounds like something that happened to me. I was advised to delete my preferences and rebuild them from scratch and it worked. Apparently, there’s something from a few versions back that gets saved in prefs that’s incompatible with the last few versions. Those who never had that setting on/off/whatever never noticed; those who did get strange crashes.
If you want to try this out non-destructively, just rename the Blender Foundation folder where the prefs are stored.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I don’t know if I did it right – I renamed the userpref.blend file and let Blender build a new one. Unfortunately, that didn’t help with the problem.
Is that what you had in mind?
(Edited to add: After rereading your post I renamed the whole config directory, but still no help.)
I have the same problem, but it crashes on me when I close out the User preferences. Happens every single time. Luckily I just save user settings and let it crash and when I restart it it’s all fine and I don’t need to go back into user pref. I have googled on this and I’ve seen that it is a CPU bug with intel cpus. Been happening to ppl for quite some time. Back to 2.64 I think. They suggested to update the cpu drivers, but I’m pretty sure mine are up to date and the person who gave that advice said it might not work. He sounded like it was a problem that was not going to be addressed on blender’s end, as it had nothing to do with Blender’s code. I have no idea when it comes to code.
Have you tried uninstalling, deleting the Blender Foundation folder, and then reinstalling?
In other words, a completely clean install.
Just to be sure we’re all on the same page, the Blender Foundation folder is in:
C:\Users<your_user_id>\AppData\Roaming\
If you haven’t made a lot of tweaks to your preferences or installed a lot of addons, you really won’t lose much by deleting your prefs, mainly, just your list of recently-editing files.
I’ve read that it is specifically a problem with the intel video drivers, and one suggestion I’ve seen is to replace them with a generic Windows 7 64-bit VGA driver. Problem is, the only ones I’ve been able to find online have been from nvidia, and they refuse to install – I imagine it’s because I’m not using an nvidia chipset.
Is anyone out there aware of another source for VGA drivers?
Agreed – I have no problem giving up any prefs that may have been accumulated somewhere along the line, and it was the config directory in C:\Users<your_user_id>\AppData\Roaming… that I renamed and replaced.
As far as deleting the whole Blender Foundation folder is concerned, though, since I’ve been having the same problem for the last half-dozen releases or so, and on two completely different machines, I doubt that that would help.