After being terrified that I lost an entire project file and finding a simple and easy solution, I thought I would post it hear in case anyone else encounters it.
The Problem: I linked a collection from a library file, and then made a change of one of objects in the library which caused the project file to crash whenever I opened it.
The solution which I found works is simply renaming the library file from something like “lib.blend,” to “lib_x.blend” and then going in and unlinking the altered data before going back and restoring the original name.
Crashing is what you DON’T want software to do. Especially in this case, where it was crashing on project load, so I wasn’t able to open it an even see what was wrong. I only figured out it was due to the library change because of a lucky guess as I’ve edited the library before and had no issues.
The preferable solution is that an error message is displayed that tells the user what is wrong, which allows the user to fix it.
Maybe you can use a batch file to start Blender in Debug Mode and then examine the log file to see what have been loaded and what went wrong before crashing.
The error code following the “exception_access_violation” message is useless to a normal user (bear in mind that most of us are NOT programmer).
The main point is the content of the log file. Depending on the log level you defined in the command line, it can record down to every action during the course of loading the .blend file.
Have you tried Linking / Appending the data/objects in the problematic .blend file from another .blend file? By linking data/objects one by one, the object causing problems or missing can be identified.
I believe it was an issue with updating a previously linked file. Like I said in the original post, I found a solution to this so it’s not a problem anymore. I posted it simply because it was a major PITA to figure out and google wasn’t any help so I figured I would post the solution to help future googlers.