I managed to crash Scrivener, and I can duplicate it.
This involves a conversion from Scriv 1.9.x to 2.9.x.
Open Scrivener.
Use File Explorer (or some equivalent; I used MultiCommander, and then duplicated this with File Explorer, just to make sure it wasn’t the File Management software causing this), double-click on an older version file (v 1.9.x). I’ve got a few laying around, and I tried several. Each produced this result. In my case, double-clicking in File Explorer produced a slight blip of something, but did not invoke Scrivener to open the file (not sure how to force this to happen; it knows that .scrivx is a Scrivener file).
Then use Scrivener to open the file directly. It’ll ask you if you want to update the format, but then it hangs.
Watch the blue wheel spin, at ~10% of CPU (per Task Manager) forever.
Use Task Manager to end the task. It’s not so broken that it takes the system with it.
Honestly, I have no idea. I wasn’t thinking of crashing the thing when I did it, but I think the file explorer process isn’t functioning correctly; when I open one of those files, it should just open Scrivener and go.
But… with Scrivener already open… oh, wait. Forgot something. Open Scrivener, and open the “Open Project” dialog; then do the thing with File Explorer. Then continue as I mentioned.
And, lest someone think this unreasonable, the dialog box for opening a project and the interface for File Explorer are remarkably similar, and if I don’t find the file I’m looking for in one, I might switch to the other, and double-click. And then, oops, that’s Explorer, not Scriv, and… well… Crash.
On further investigation, this is a general bug (or at least a problem; it might be a “bug” per se), not just affecting conversions.
When you use the Open Project function and have the “exploration” window open, if you try to open a project using File Explorer (or an equivalent), Scrivener will crash.
I rebooted, tried again (this time with a v3 project), and duplicated the problem.
I thought, maybe this is a Windows issue… tried with LibreOffice the same thing. Same problem? No. With that program, if I select a file with the “Open file” window, and I attempt to load something with the same NAME, it crashes (bug will be reported; it shouldn’t).
But in Scrivener, I didn’t even load a file, simply used the “Open an existing project” from the start dialog box, didn’t load anything (leaving the window open), and then opened a project using File Explorer. The project loaded (sort of – i could see in the thumbnail that something was open and it looked about right), and Scrivener crashed.