Can't open any projects anymore

For some reason, Unity no longer opens any projects for me. When clicking a project in the Hub, I do get the splash screen and loading bars, and, for some projects, the editor window even opens up but is all white before closing again. For other projects, the editor window never even opens after the splash screen is done.

This seems to have happened randomly; I havent used Unity in a week, and before it was working fine. Not aware of anything I could have done that would cause this.

Ive been troubleshooting this and digging through the forums for a few hours now already. What has been suggested in these threads and what I tried, and didn’t work for me:

  • Restarted hub
  • Restarted computer
  • Added student license (Cant seem to remove a personal license through the hub?)
  • Reinstalled editor
  • Reinstalled hub
  • Tried creating projects in different directory

Here is the full Editor.log

Looks like it’s crashing trying to load some editor resources. Since this is “random” I suspect there’s a system level problem here.

This could be a corrupt installation, but since you reinstalled already, it’s either some cached data that doesn’t get cleaned when reinstalling (eg Unity appdata caches) so you could uninstall editors and Hub and then also remove all the Unity related AppData caches before reinstalling. Also delete the Library folder in the project you are trying to open.

The other culprit could be 3rd party security software which is commonly interfering (and generally doesn’t do a good job anyway). So be sure to at least disable it or uninstall and let Windows Defender do the same job without obnoxiously intrusive behaviour designed only to convince users that spending money on a “security software” was money well spent (it isn’t).

Lastly, is the system generally stable? If any other software also mucks up or the system freezes or crashes more than once a week it cannot be considered stable and may have some driver or hardware issue.

Thanks for the reply.

This could be a corrupt installation, but since you reinstalled already, it’s either some cached data that doesn’t get cleaned when reinstalling (eg Unity appdata caches) so you could uninstall editors and Hub and then also remove all the Unity related AppData caches before reinstalling. Also delete the Library folder in the project you are trying to open.

I did try cleaning all caches + deleting the library folder as well, but not together with the reinstallation. Will try that once Im back at my computer.

The other culprit could be 3rd party security software which is commonly interfering (and generally doesn’t do a good job anyway). So be sure to at least disable it or uninstall and let Windows Defender do the same job without obnoxiously intrusive behaviour designed only to convince users that spending money on a “security software” was money well spent (it isn’t).

I do only use windows Defender (and also tried disabling that fully, forgot to list in the original post)

Lastly, is the system generally stable? If any other software also mucks up or the system freezes or crashes more than once a week it cannot be considered stable and may have some driver or hardware issue.

Id say so. Did have one crash about two weeks ago, but Unity still worked fine after that. No crashes or other weird issues since.

Hi, I have same problem. Did you resolve it?

I uninstall all the softwares that I installed after last time I open Unity normally, it works. Although I don’t know which software caused the problem.
Hope it works to you.

Could you give us a list of the applications you recall having uninstalled? Just for future reference respectively to consider which could possibly have been interfering. I’d expect something deeply hooking into the system like some ‘security’ software.

Thanks for the reply.
As additional information, last time I open Unity normally is Oct 2024. I also deleted the previously installed applications in case.

The applications I uninstalled:
(Installed after Oct 2024)
1.Wisecleaner
2.Baidu Netdisk
3.CopyTrans Studio

(Installed before Oct 2024)
1.Avira Antivirus
2.OneDrive

I used to use Avira until maybe ten years ago. It’s a disaster that got so bad I ditched it despite still having had licenses paid and active. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s causing issues.

The “cleaners” are also potentially disastrous in general, and particularly for Unity projects. A common case is deleting duplicates. Such a tool will find the same file in 10 different Unity projects because each project uses the same files, at least if the project uses the same version (major/minor) of the editor or packages. Then the tool (or the user) deletes 9 of these files, causing 9 out of 10 Unity projects to malfunction in one way or another.

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Thank you for your explanation. It helped me understand clearly.
I will avoid installing such apps in the future. :sweat: