Lightroom 3 crash after upgrading Lightroom 1 Catalog

Question

I installed Lightroom 3 and upgraded my Lightroom 1 catalog (21,000 photos). It runs through the upgrade process without any problems and opens Lightroom 3, where I can browse through a few screens of images.
However, if I scroll past a certain point in my Grid view, Lightroom 3 stops rendering thumbnails. Double clicking on images fails to render a preview.  CPU usage at this point goes from 50% to 0.  At this point, Lightroom 3 becomes useless, though I can still scroll up and down, I only see empty grid thumbnail frames.
If I quit the application, I get a beachball, for minutes on end before I force quit.
Console reports the following:
06/10/10 9:53:24 PM Adobe Lightroom 3[506] ServerProcess [AsyncDataServer( Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat )] ERROR SERVER<AsyncDataServer
( Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat )>: A command threw an exception.
06/10/10 9:53:24 PM Adobe Lightroom 3[506] ServerProcess [AsyncDataServer( Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat )] ERROR Error: ?:0: attempt to
perform arithmetic on field '?' (a nil value)
06/10/10 9:53:24 PM Adobe Lightroom 3[506] Error initializing alternate universe. bad argument #1 to 'pairs' (table expected, got nil)
Deleting all Lightroom 3 prefs, plists, catalog, previews, rebooting and trying the process again results in exactly the same problem.
I can still run Lightroom 1 fine. It has no problem with the Lightroom 1 catalog.  I tried optimizing the Lightroom 1 catalog before upgrading, but this
did nothing.
I'm running on a 2007 MacBookPro with 3GB RAM and a 7200 RPM 500GB drive under Mac OS X 10.5.8.

Answer 1

The problem lies in 1 or more "corrupt" catalog entries from the old catalog. I had exactly the same problem going from LR2 to LR3 on a 2009 iMac running 10.6.4. I got the same console error messages and had exactly the same symptoms.
However I discovered that I could start LR3 with a new empty library and then use "import from catalog" to selectively import some parts from my LR2 catalog. There are about 6k images in the LR2 catalog and some folders would work fine and others would fail. After a lot of trial and error I was able to isolate where LR3 would hang and give me problems. And the images that it had a problem with were 2 images from the old catalog that LR2 would not display. Instead LR2 would show a blank thumbnail where the "corrupt" catalog thumbnail should be and would not be able to display that image. For those images, LR2 gave the following console error message:
10-07-01 8:58:48 AM Adobe Lightroom 2[2038] *** WARNING: Method selectRow:byExtendingSelection: in class AgNSOutlineView is deprecated. It will be removed in a future release and should no longer be used.
10-07-01 9:02:04 AM Adobe Lightroom 2[2038] ?:0: attempt to perform arithmetic on field '?' (a nil value)
Aside from not display the thumbnails and images for those two files, LR2 worked fine. When I unselected those two images from the "import from catalog" dialog, I was able to import the rest of my LR2 catalog into LR3 in one shot.
If LR1 fails to display some thumbnails, you could manually note which those are and then use the same process I used. It is still tedious going through a large library looking for blank thumbnails. If LR1 displays all thumbnails correctly then you could try the brute force trial and error approach that I initially used but that is very time consuming.
Hope this helps.