Finally had more time to work on this. Tried generating the crash again. What’s weird is I get a blank log file when it crashes on boot. While I was looking at logs, I did some poking around.
Found and deleted a duplicate gamelist.xml under /opt/retropie for one of my systems from before I did my scraping. I thought I had cleaned those all out beforehand. The others are on the same drive as my game library.
I checked for and installed Retropie updates.
Not very scientific, I admit, so I regret if I’ve muddied the troubleshooting. That said, I’ve made progress. I’ve started getting errors about input devices:
“void InputManager::addJoystickByDeviceIndex(int): Assertion ‘joy’ failed.”
Assertion joy failed. You and me both, buddy!
Basically, it doesn’t seem to like that I have my 8BitDo dongle plugged in. I also have a couple of controllers paired directly with Bluetooth. Was trying different methods to see if one was more responsive than the other. Well, even with the Bluetooth controllers turned off, it seems like it is just enough to anger things during boot. Unplugging the dongle stopped the crashes. I just wait until after boot to plug in.
The only remaining thing that troubles me is why did it matter what theme I had before? Why did turning off favorites and last played collections help. That duplicate gamelist.xml may have mattered more than I thought.
Well, enough rambling from me. Hope this helps someone later on if they run into similar issues.