After a few emails back and forth with LHR and not yet coming to a conclusion (but they had not given up), today out of desperation I totally deleted (well, moved) all the Designer files, uninstalled 1.187, and then did a fresh install. I tried to see how many holes I could drill in a project and managed to get fairly consistently just under 1400, which I'd think is doing pretty well. So, I kept adding my old folders and files back into the users\dave\carvewright folder and testing Designer each time until it finally crashed.


A few years ago when someone was selling a collection all the patterns and projects from the forum on ebay, someone made a DVD of all the files that had been posted on the forums and made those files freely available. Within that collection are 897 pattern files, about 54 MB total. It appears the pattern files in that folder were causing the issue!

I have verified it's not any particular pattern file. It is just the sheer volume and/or memory used loading these files on start-up. I'm not sure why Designer loads other directories or if there is a way around it, but am hoping LHR will send back some answer to that soon.


So, it appears it's not just how large your favorites file is, but also how many pattern files you have in your carvewright directory or any sub-folder within that directory.