System Information
Operating system: Windows-10-10.0.18362-SP0 64 Bits
Graphics card: GeForce RTX 2060/PCIe/SSE2 NVIDIA Corporation 4.5.0 NVIDIA 445.87
Blender Version
Broken: version: 2.83.6, branch: master, commit date: 2020-09-09 07:32, hash: rB8610c697773e
Worked: (newest version of Blender that worked as expected)
Short description of error
Blender 2.8x crash when loading a 2.79 blend file
I made some tests and think that the crash is related to group and group instance.
Exact steps for others to reproduce the error
Load Crash_with_empty.blend (who is a 2.79 blend) in Blender 2.8x and he will crash.
The .blend is very light with just a group instancier and a group who contains an empty.
You can also load Ok_with_mesh.blend who is the same configuration but with a mesh in the group; and this time it well be fine.
I have this issue on multiple windows machine (i have not test on Linux or Mac)
Post Scriptum
I work for a company that has been using Blender for years at a rate of around 100 renderings per day. We recently upgraded to Blender version 2.83.x.
Blender 2.79 was great, next versions could be even better.
So let's do it together!
Thank