Blender crash on Open/Save/Import/Export but app works as normal

Question

Sorry to ask this nooby question here but I've not had any luck elsewhere.

I'd love to get stuck into using Blender and was doing fine for a few days but then I opened Blender 2.79 portable so I could export some 3ds files and since then I've not been able to open, save, import or export anything from Blender 2.83.

I can use 2.83 in a single session and everything works fine but as soon as I do any of the above Blender immediately crashes, even for example trying to save the default Blender scene.

I've tried deleting the prefs folder, uninstalling everything and starting again but still the same. I've also updated my graphics drivers.

W10, i7, GTX 1070, 48GB RAM.

Please could someone help me get to the bottom of this.

Thank you

Answer 1

Start blender from a terminal. And see if any errors show up. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/render/workflows/command_line.html

Platforms How to actually execute Blender from the command line depends on the platform and where you have installed Blender. Here are basic instructions for the different platforms.

Linux Open a terminal, then go to the directory where Blender is installed, and run Blender like this:

cd <blender installation directory>
./blender

If you have Blender installed in your PATH (usually when Blender is installed through a distribution package), you can simply run:

blender

macOS Open the terminal application, go to the directory where Blender is installed, and run the executable within the app bundle, with commands like this:

cd /Applications/Blender
./blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender

If you need to do this often, you can make an alias so that typing just blender in the terminal works. For that you can run a command like this in the terminal (with the appropriate path).

echo "alias blender=/Applications/Blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender" >> ~/.bash_profile

If you then open a new terminal, the following command will work:

blender

MS-Windows Open the Command Prompt, go to the directory where Blender is installed, and then run Blender:

cd c:\<blender installation directory>
blender

You can also add the Blender folder to your system PATH so that do you do not have to cd to it each time.

You can also try to reset user preferences (this will reset blender to stock) https://www.katsbits.com/codex/userpref/