Adobe support for shit like this is disgraceful. They appear to rely entirely on their user community to figure out why their software crashes. When you go through what everyone says, redo the catalog, turn off auto facial recognition, sacrifice a chicken, etc. everything is still crashy. At the end of the day though, it's usually garbage in garbage out right?
I used PROCMON to try and pinpoint what was going on when the crash happened. You go to Tools\Count Occurrences, set the column to "results" and look for bad things like "Access denied", etc. In this case, nothing..
I went through the adobe logs, but they only log at start up, not on stuff like imports, which is not useful. Never looked into a verbose logging setting, and carried onto the next test.
Step through the folders I was importing one at a time, backing up the catalog when I had success and no crash. The catalogs in WIN10 are in "C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Elements Organizer\Catalogs" and you just make a backup copy of the folder. Keep importing, taking notes and then restore when you have a crash an start looking at the types of files in the folder that gives you the issue.
In my case, it was having non photo files in the folders with my pictures. In my case I had made a slide show and kept the source files for MUVEE reveal ( *.rvl and .PKF files) in a subfolder off the folder with the photos. It also did not like the AVI files (not sure what flavor I had) I had generated making a raiders of the lost ark type animated travel line. Once the .AVI files were ZIPPED so Elements would not import them, the crashing went away.
No thanks to Adobe...
