I just recently begun having this issue and it has come to my attention that a file within my catalog window may be corrupt -- I have no idea how that could have happened but I chose to manually remove the bulk of my resource-dump folder into subsections to try and isolate the issue. Now the resources folder only has feature classes (shape, point, line) and still crashes. The file size is about 183 Mb. The other file folders--the ones created to troubleshoot the problem, all open fine, however, when I try and load any of the csv files from this folder it also crashes. Now I have a resources and CSV folder that are crashing Arcmap. One crashes Arcmap when the folder is opened and the other crashes it when trying to pull the file into the work space.
Side note, some suggestions for a fix revolve around the use of ArcCatalog. It wont open for me. What on earth is going on here!
I looked in the %appdata%->Esri folder for a crash log and no dice.
Edit 1 - Arcmap seems to be crashing when I try and do almost anything now. I just recently went to the geoprocessing tab to look up the Add Data Tool as a suggested workaround in another thread. It then froze for a while and crashed. My CPU is at 2% load and my memory is at 40% so I'm not sure that its a computer resources problem.
Edit 2 - I think I know what I did wrong. I recently removed the python27 folder mistakenly assuming that it wasn't part of the Arcmap directory -- I was upgrading to another python version to utilize python-pandas library. I went to uninstall, chose uninstall, then repair. This seems to have re-installed the python27 folder in the right folder directory (which I now know was the Arcmap directory). Seems to be working!