ArcGIS Pro 3.6.59 crashes as soon as I open a project

Question

I suddenly started having major issues where I cannot open any of my project files. Arc starts fine but when open an existing project or a new one, it immediately crashes. This started happening yesterday after a weird issue where the application froze, all tool bars were greyed out but I could still click on layers in the content pane. I force shut the ArcGIS Pro task and I believe this was the start of the issues. I since upgraded to the newest version of Arc and .NET, but no luck.

KatharinePerkin · Answer

Having the same issue with newly created map projects in 3.6. 
They will work for a few days and then will start crashing upon opening.

Opening the map in another computer on 3.4.3 the project opens and works fine.

I am also noticing the time stamp for the project doesn't match what actually happened.

Are you able to open the crashing map projects in another computer or version of pro and are you noticing incorrect timestamps for the projects that are crashing?

Edit: I was able to resolve this issue by removing the plug ins that were installed in arcgis pro. Once they were removed the map projects that were previously crashing stopped crashing immediately after opening.

RTPL_AU · Answer

Commenting to subscribe and ask that someone with time on their hands lodge an Idea to make the user profile etc more robust.

It seems extremely fragile at the moment, and the global productivity loss due to doing soft resets  for every issue and then reconfiguring custom settings you need to be efficient, must count to a serious amount of $....

RandyKreuziger1 · Answer

I've seen this twice.  Each time the user.config file was corrupted.  The first system it was obviously corrupted and on the second system I removed it as part of the soft reset mentioned above.