Can't import anything into unity

Newbie questions, apologies in advance.

I’m using Windows 8 and have the free version of Unity 4.2.2.

I am a cinema/tv animator and haven’t set much brain-space aside for coding and it’s been years since I’ve had to deal with a games pipeline, but I’ve been tasked with getting animations into unity for a game.

Exporting animation as fbx, or saving as .mb or .ma yields the same result, when I import the asset into unity, I get the error Unity Editor has stopped working

So I created a simple mesh, tried again, Unity Editor has stopped working.
I downloaded a free model from the community (a tree), Unity Editor has stopped working.
Every subsequent attempt to open Unity just opened up the crash report. I went into my project folder and deleted the tree asset, reinstalled unity, just for yucks, and now it opens again.
Out of interest, I decided to open the Angry Bots project that came with the download: Unity Editor has stopped working… Now it seems to crash when it tries to load anything from the Explosions\Textures… folder (.psd files - could this be because I don’t have photoshop on my machine?)

Incidentally, attempts to open Unity in the command line returns with the confusing error, “Windows cannot find ‘Unity.exe’”

a) Am I trying to do something in the free version that isn’t allowed?
b) Is right-click/import new asset not the way to, ahem, import a new asset?
c) Have I got a corrupted Unity download?
d) All of the above?

Thanks in advance for any help.

In general what you’re doing is fine. You probably have a corrupted project. Look in (yourProject)->Library->FailedAssetImports, or if you notice what it was doing when it crashes. Deleting the bad asset (from Assets folder) can fix it.

Unity always tries to open the most recent project. To test, you could move the Project (in your real filsystem) and see if Unity opens to an empty, but working project.

For the corruption, I’ve had it happen when I opened an “Import Assets” window, then by mistake also opened a system folder and tried to drag that in (or vice-versa?) Because:

The simplest way to import is to just drag into the the Project panel, into whichever folder you want. I think the Import dropdown is just there for completeness, but there’s no reason to ever use it. FYI, never had a corruption problem with dragging in. Even with unknown formats.

Update:
Thanks for the responses.

I checked my display driver (up to date), installed VS2012, even updated to Windows 8.1 in the hope of versioning out of the error, but Unity still crashes.

however , my collegue was able to get one of my animations working by opening an fbx I sent him on his machine (windows 7, maya 2013, unity 4.2.0) in maya and reexporting. So at least I know it’ll work down the line, even if I can’t get it to work here. I’ll just have to do all the blend animations on paper and send them to the coder - not ideal, but the best I can hope for until a more solid solution presents itself.

For my money, I’d say it’s a software/hardware compatibility issue, but I don’t really have the knowledge to pin it down any further.

Thanks again, everyone