Anki crashes on load

Anki Help
1

Anki started crashing all of a sudden for no reason at all. It was working fine the whole time, just did my reps yesterday, but today it just decided to stop working. Holding down Shift didn’t help. Here are the logs:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “aqt\main.py”, line 441, in loadCollection
File “aqt\main.py”, line 462, in loadCollection
File “lib\site-packages\anki\storage.py”, line 59, in Collection
File “lib\site-packages\anki\collection.py”, line 101, in init
File “lib\site-packages\anki\collection.py”, line 196, in load
File "json_init.py", line 357, in loads
File “json\decoder.py”, line 337, in decode
File “json\decoder.py”, line 355, in raw_decode
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

I did some research on this issue and people seem to be saying that this particular problem is caused by installing previous versions of Anki, but I’ll note that I have not installed any previous versions prior to what happened. What else could be causing this?

EDIT: I tried installing the same version I use now on a different partition. Same thing, won’t open. It does suggest me to open a backup, but when I choose one it says “Unable to move existing file to trash - please try restarting your computer.” which I did and it didn’t help either.

2

Figured out that it was the Habitica add-on that was causing it. Deleting its folder fixed the issue

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Most interesting. I didn’t know that was possible.

Does that show as two entries in Control Panel? (Maybe you uninstalled from the first partition before re-installing on the second ?)

Thanks.
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Not sure about the control panel, I just had it previously installed on disk F which recently was starting to show signs of corruption (that HDD is pretty old). I moved Anki to a different HDD that was fine and so I thought that corrupted files might’ve been the case, so I tried a clean install on my OS SSD, and that install still wouldn’t open.

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Glad you got it fixed.
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A drastic fix :slight_smile:

During troubleshooting, simply disabling other addon-ons is normal.

But in your OP, you said:

All very puzzling, but all’s well that ends well, as the French say.

Thanks