My solution would be to uninstall the program and then re-install it, this time into a totally new directory.

Note: I have not experienced this issue myself (at least not with ETABS). However, I did tech support for RISA for many years and ran into that problem a few times. The issue with RISA was that some file on the computer that was necessary to run the program had gotten corrupted and had bad data in it. That bad data caused the program to be unstable and have memory issues.

The symptoms of something like this can vary. Sometimes it will crash at the very beginning before you do anything. But, more likely it will wait until you do something that requires the program to access the corrupted data.

This is something of a wild guess, but a strategic wild guess. And, the solution could still work even if my guess about the cause is wrong.

I figured out a fix for this issue. My work laptop has pretty decent graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070), so this was the last thing I was considering checking. The fix for me was to change Options>Graphics Mode>Standard Graphics. Default was DirectX.

Wow, that's good to know. Thanks for sharing the cause. Hopefully, this thread will help others if they run into a similar issue.

I spent the last hour hitting on hand on the wall for this, thanks Andrew for sharing the solution.

I have a similar issue with versions 18-20 on my laptop. Starting a new project completely freezes my system and I have to do a forced shutdown by holding down the power button. Restarting former projects isn't any better either as the same thing happens within a minute or so of the project launching, any suggestions please?

Daniel, try changing the graphics settings after opening the program. Do this before creating a new model.

Glad you figured it out, AndrewY. Do same if you have SAFE as well. I used to experience this till I changed my graphic setting. I don't experience this on AMD though.