Lightroom 2.6 freezes when trying to export images

Question

I have been using LR successfully on a Windows XP machine for several years and using version 2.6 for the past several weeks . As of a few days ago, LR would freeze when trying to export images. The export functions of 'Export with Previous' and 'Export with Preset' seem to work without crashing LR but most of my exporting needs me the ability to adjust the export settings. Any advise?

Answer 1

I would guess LR only goes by drive-letter so if you've kept that the same it should be ok.  Look for something else.
I would look in your Lightroom Preferences files to see if there is any drive letter that no longer exists.
On Vista/Win7 my LR prefs file is in:
C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences
XP has something similar under C:\Documents and Settings\Local Settings (or Application Data)
If you open that file in a simple text-editor like NotePad then about halfway down (at least in mine) there are some export-related things that include the drive-letter and path on your hard-drive to various folders.  You can find it by searching for:
AgMRUPopupList_AgExport_destinationFolderPathPrefix
Look through those and see if any of the drive-letters or paths are wrong and look around for other paths.  The paths will contain
or
instead of \ because the low-level language routines LR is written with need it that way so if you change anything, keep the number of slashes consistent.
It could very well be that there is nothing wrong with any of the paths, so another approach would be to rename or move your preferences file to see if LR will recreate it with defaults for everything, and see if that clears up the lockups. 
Whether you decided to edit or rename your preferences file, please make a backup copy so you can put it back in case something even worse happens and you need it back.