I want to post an update on this in case it’s of any help to somebody else. The project had gotten to a point where it would render one or two frames at the most and stall forever.
So it was either going back a few versions until I found one that worked, or try to fix this project. Since I had done a large number of things to the current version I didn’t want to have to redo everything.
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I went through all the items in the Clean Up menu item, just as a guess. It didn’t find anything major, just one thing that fixed, can’t remember what it was.
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I went to the External Data menu item (under File) and checked “Automatically Pack Resources”.
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Also under External Data, I clicked on “Make Paths Relative”
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Under the same submenu, I clicked on “Pack Linked Libraries” (this probably has nothing to do with anything, but just in case)
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And also under that submenu, I clicked on “Report Missing Files”
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I recreated the folder hierarchy under my home folder (it was sitting on an external SSD).
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I copied just the files that I needed, the blend file and the folder with all the textures
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Opened the project from the new location
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Did another missing files report. In this case, one file came up, and it was a file that I had used as a temp background in the compositing module. So I removed all those nodes, but I ran the report again and that file still shows as missing, although nothing else in the project is using it, so I’m not sure why. But it doesn’t seem to hurt anything.
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In the new project, I went through the outliner and cleaned some collections and other things that I had tried and ended up not using.
And after all that, the project renders just fine, at least the range I left rendering overnight. So hopefully these steps will help some other newbie like myself.