Adobe Lightroom Classic constantly crashing in Windows? Unplug your Android devices.

I had a really frustrating few hours of Adobe Lightroom Classic version 10.3 crashing constantly on a Windows machine. Lightroom repeatedly crashed after launch no matter what I did (it crashed even if I did nothing in the app). I tried restarting my computer, creating a new Lightroom library, downgrading the NVIDIA graphics driver, doing a clean uninstall/reinstall of the NVIDIA driver, and uninstalling and reinstalling Lightroom.

Finally, I looked down and saw that a Google Pixel 4 was plugged into the computer–I had been transferring files to the device earlier, and it was still in USB File Transfer mode. I unplugged the smartphone… and Lightroom started working again! I was surprised that the Android device caused issues even when I wasn’t trying to import from Lightroom.