Hammer randomly crashing apon startup
The probelm occures also to me. Sometimes when I click the "open" menu point, Hammer freezes. Sometimes, but not always.
A map pack coming soon. - click for more information
I have it too sometimes. Seems like there's nothing you can really do about it except killing and restarting it.
Another thing I noticed: a few weeks ago Hammer seemed particularly prone to crashes for a while, so I set the auto-save interval to the "extreme paranoia" setting. That actually made the crashing even worse. Disabling the autosave seems to result in fewer crashes. (However I would not recommend this to anyone, for obvious reasons.)
Wild speculation: if you are doing something (moving things, changing properties, staring at the monitor) at the exact moment while it's autosaving, it crashes? My autosaves often seem alarmingly up to date after a crash...
Sarcasm self-test complete? 
Other Portal 2 maps: Medusa Glare
Portal 1 maps: Try Anything Twice | Manic Mechanic
I'm still experiencing this problem, and have notified Valve.
Sometimes the 'load File' window remains blank forever, sometimes it's fine and 'Save As' window does the same thing instead. I think I'm being punished for hating the PTI Editor 
"Such monstrous sucking-constructions aren't built within one afternoon"
Sometimes the 'load File' window remains blank forever, sometimes it's fine and 'Save As' window does the same thing instead. I think I'm being punished for hating the PTI Editor
What helped for me is randomly opening a map from the most recent 5 I can just open from the file menu (often an instance) and after I loaded that, keep it open and load another map. For some reason that helps evade the stuck on load error.
This works, but does nothing for my 'Save As' window.
I can ONLY do a 'regular' save with the same name as my existing project. I can work around this by manually renaming VMF files, but it's a real pain in the behind
"Such monstrous sucking-constructions aren't built within one afternoon"
Alright, now all of a sudden my save as isnt working and lost quite a few changes to a map. Also autosave isnt working properly. Im getting really sick of this.
Yeah, this is becoming REALLY annoying! In addition to our paranoid tendencies that make us hit Ctrl+S every 4-5 min. or after every time we introduced an important change in the map, now we also have to hit it before every attempt to load an instance, another map, or saving your map under a different name...
Does anyone know if Valve is trying to fix this at all??
useful tools and stuff here on TWP 
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I certainly hope so.
Does anyone have an old version of hammer.exe?
Great, now portal 2 ITSELF is acting up for me along with the billions of hammer problems.
Im emailing valve. 
Im emailing valve.
Kay, I just emaild the SDK help. Heres what I said.
Hello.
Me, and many other mappers, are experiencing crashes in hammer quite frequently. Most particularly in Portal 2. From what people are saying, and myself, hammer (but not usually the authoring tools window itself) starts not responding/crashing for the following reasons;
•Trying to Save As
•Opening instances
•Trying to open a vmf
•Trying to run hammer itself
•Choosing a texture
•For me rarely when opening a point file
•And on another note, when I try to play community maps in PeTI, Portal 2 crashes!
I/we honestly don't know what to do and we hope to god you're fixing this.
Also, I think this may or may not be affecting episode 3. Don't you think?
Thank you for your time.
Ryanw2ooo.vmf on steam [currently]
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I think I might've screwed it all up on that episode 3 thing. 