Lightroom 4 crashes on import

Question

Windows 7, Home Edition, version 6.1 service pack 1
Intel 7, with more than 400gb memory available
I've now spent more than 32 hours trying to solve this problem, including two phone calls and three chat sessions with Adobe Help Desk.  The Help desk takes me through the same checklist of "fixes" as the previous calls and inquiries and has resulted only in wasting more hours of my time. 
To date I have tried the following to fix this issue:
- uninstall and reinstall with and without the LR 4.1 update
- create a new administrator account on my machine and run LR off the new account instead
- create a new catalogue for every import (which kind of defeates the purpose of having LR to begin with)
- wipe out my old preferences file and allow LR to create a new one
- completely wipe my hard drive and reinstall EVERYTHING all over again
- rebuild my catalogues from scratch on a new, fresh install of lightroom
- limit my cache size in LR preferences
- limit my backups in LR preferences
- change my 1:1 previews
- attempt to import images from a Nikon 90, D3s and D800 only, each on a fresh LR install (in an effort to see if it was a particular camera model causing the issue)
- attempted to only import directly from another hard drive, rather than an external or internal card reader
Each time I have no more than a day of proper working conditions before the program hangs up and windows pops up a warning that the program has ceased to respond and must close.  Lightroom is rather useless if I can not import images.
I'm out of solutions or fixes, and out of patience now too.  I'd really like to continue using Lightroom products because of how integral it is to my workflow.  At this point I'm ready to switch to a competitor if this issue can not be solved.

Answer 1

Hi Dave lorde,
Do you get an error dialog for Lightroom crashing?
Also which version of Lightroom are you using? Have you tried with Lightroom 4.4 yet?
You might also try downloading the Lightroom 5 beta that is available now on labs.adobe.com and see how it works on your system there.
As for the current issues, my suggestions are as follows:
0. Make sure you're up to date with LR 4.4 or LR5 beta
1. Take a look through our performance optimization documents for Lightroom and see if any of these suggestions give you something to work with:
Optimize LR performance
http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html
Performance Hints
http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/performance-hints.html
2. Try resetting Lightroom's preferences: http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/recover-catalog-images-resetting-lightrooms.html#id_90 046
3. Try Lightroom in a new administrator user to see if the hangs continue.
Let us know how it goes,
regards,
Pete