Comment 3 for bug 1641099

This is annoyingly intermittent, in particular because there is a pattern of pcmanfm crashing after launch for 4-6 times in a row, then you attempt a fix and it appears to work after that. Could it be dependent on some uninitialised data? I can try a memtest.

Sometimes launching from gnome-terminal without any other changes stops the crash. I've also tried letting the window open and then choosing a shortcut from 'Places' and it stays open. So maybe it's related to a file in my home directory (I have some weird stuff there like tcpdumps). Note that current options are 'Show thumbnails of files' is not ticked, but 'Only show thumbnails for local files' is ticked - not that that combination makes much sense.

I also tried
  mkdir causing-pcmanfm-probs && find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime -365 | grep -v '\./\.' | xargs -I{} mv {} causing-pcmanfm-probs/
and that seemed to allow pcmanfm to open - this time :)

I could try gdb on a dumped core to get some clues, but I always find it difficult to get one with Apport installed.

PS: comment 2 should read 'with no changes'.