Thank you everybody for continuing to troubleshoot I had to drop off there for a bit to get some sleep Downside of being a human sometimes. But super excited to see the Local State and also the profile section of the Local State. I had a hunch it was related to the avatar - but didnāt think to look in Local State.
BTW - for anybody moving the profile directory out of the way, that is only a temporary fix. That helped us narrow down it was something in the profile. Definitely you should put back your data! Your bookmarks, cookies, etc are important
It seem like Local State is where there is something broken. I wonder for folks experiencing the issue who are adventurous, if you navigate directly to chrome://theme/IDR_PROFILE_AVATAR_28 does the browser crash?
Iāve shared the updated info here with the team - weāll continue investigating along with everybody here.
I had to do the opposite of what he said. I left all the files and added my folders instead. He says leave the files and dont put the folders but when I tried that it still didnt work.
I have lost all my tabs and current open tab history which is a lot but I still have my history so I should be able to rebuild what I had from that.
I also lost my settings like dark mode.
Still have autofill and bookmarks.
I did lose my passwords =/.
Because I started over, I thought my bookmarks were goneāthen I remembered I have Brave on my phone. And my bookmarks were still there. It took a bit of exploring but I was able to export them and send them to my PC. Just imported them into Brave. It will take some moving them around but I have them.
I think the root cause might be that the icon resources were shuffled around / deleted / modified by Chromium. This icon is also referenced in the Preferences file and maybe they need to match?
OK we have a fix! Just need to clean it up, submit a patch, and review it. This is a P1 issue meaning weāll get a fix out as soon as possible.
Thanks for your patience folks!
BTW - the root cause seems to be: folks who picked a Chromium icon a long time ago. If youāve responded here, please let us know if youāve been a Brave user for a while. For example, the IDR_PROFILE_AVATAR_28 is a picture of a Corgi. We used to display the Chromium profile icons in Brave and let folks pick them. Then, we hid them.
The root cause is that folks with those old icons set are now hitting a code path which breaks. But only on Windows.
My Brave installation is from 2019, Iāve always backed up when I reinstalled windows. I donāt exactly remember picking an Icon, but this could very well be the case. My icon number was 32.
Thanks for the quick fix!
I just tried this. After reattempting to launch Brave, all of my profiles with an old chromium icons are now completely wiped to a fresh blank state. The folders in User Data for these profiles are brand new with no traces of my old profiles. Profiles without an old icon are untouched.
Is there anyway I can recover my old profiles? I have important bookmarks that I do not have a backup of stored in profiles that vanished.
Booted my second pc, brave ofc not starting.
After butchering the profile with deleting extensions, cache, whatever i could. Still wont start. Launching in private window does work, but crashes as soon as i open settings.
So for a test, i copied my BraveSoftware folder from main Program files pc to second pc and replaced original folder there, bam, Brave loaded fine. All tabs, extensions, everything works.
All I did was change the avatar icon from different numbers to 26 in the Local State.
After restarting Brave it launched and said āYour preferences failed to loadā or something similar, I donāt remember the exact message.
All of my profiles I made in 2020 had their folders replaced with fresh empty profiles. I can not find any trace of my old profiles and their bookmarks, history, etc. in the trash.
ah interesting. OK that happens when the Local State thinks its corrupt. There should be a file called Local State.bad or something like this. That is the backup of the file before it clears itself. You can open that in an editor and try to change it back like it was. Itās going to be in JSON format - you can paste the contents into a JSON validator. I bet there was a missing character like [ or ] or } or {
Please let me know if you have that - the profiles you created should still be there. If you go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data you should see the folders inside there - with the name of the profile being the folder name. Or if you didnāt set one, itāll be Profile 1, Profile 2, etc. The default profile is Default.
Yes, the profile folders have been completely replaced with folders of brand new profiles.
My profiles were Profile 2 and Profile 6. Both folders for those profiles have a creation date of when I reopened Brave after changing the Local State. Nothing from before changing the Local State is still there.
We just released the fix! Itās live. You can either way a day for the update to happen automatically OR you can go to https://brave.com/download/ and install over your current Brave. This wonāt affect your profile so itās safe to do and youāll be fixed.
I had to drop off there for a bit to get some sleep 
Downside of being a human sometimes. But super excited to see the 
