Please:

• Ensure both your OS and drivers are fully up-to-date. (Service Pack 1 is required for windows 7)
• Ensure your GPU driver supports at least OpenGL 1.4.
• Try to disable any running antivirus.
• Try the latest build from our buildbot.
• Try to start Blender in factory settings (--factory-startup command line option) (this will ensure whether this is a userpref or addon issue or not).
• Try to tweak OGL settings in UserPreferences, System tab.
• Try to tweak your GPU driver settings (e.g. try different values between 'performance' and 'quality' if you have such slider, etc.).
• Attach here the report generated by Help -> System Info.
• Launch Blender from the command line and attach here any error printed out in the console.
• Try to place this dll next to your blender.exe (software OGL, will be slow, but will show whether this is a driver issue or not).

Here is something that may interest you: When I click in the lower left corner of a docked window and select User Preferences in the menu I am able to get around the problem. A docked version of the User Preferences window comes up.

I have Service Pack 1
How do I check what my GPU driver supports?
I am not going to disable Norton Antivirus.
The builds in the download site say “Use at your own risk.” I do not want to take the risk.
I loaded factory settings and the problem was not fixed.
I am sure this is not an addon issue because I removed the addon folder and the problem did not go away.
Help → System Info gives a message saying the report is stored in system-info.txt but does not tell what directory it’s in and I couldn’t find it. This is a promising strategy so please tell me where the file can be found.
How do I launch Blender from the command line?

I need answers, not guesses.
Ruben Glueck

• Service pack one good
• We can do that with the system Info
• Thats fine
• The builds are fine its just because they are not official releases and might include a fix for this already
• OK
• The system info is open in blender's text editor Run it by selecting it in Help » System » System information.... After a while a popup appears to confirm it has finished. Open a Text Editor window. Select the system-info.txt text in the header selector. In case you see an apparently blank page, please try to scroll it with Wheel the text cursor might be at the end of the text.

• Please test the .dll
• To run a Blender from cmd

1. Find the location of blender.exe (If you downloaded blender from the .msi then it will be in the program files. If you used the .zip find the directory were you unzipped blender to)

2. Once you have found it right click on it and go to properties
3. Under general you should see location select it and copy it
4. open your start menu type CMD a hit enter
5. A black window will open with some text type cd+space+right click and hit paste you should get this CD C:\Users\Aaron\Downloads\Blender\blender-2.75-709a31d-win64\Blender-2.75.0-git.709a31d-AMD64 and hit enter
6. Now type blender.exe --debug-cycles and hit enter

And we can't give you answers without you doing your part of the job. You do your half of the work, then we can do our half :)
For the time being the only thing we can do is guessing.

Anyway... Crashes on startup can have many reasons, that's why we have the standard routine you've been asked to follow above. In many cases, this routine helps resolving the crash, if it doesn't, we need to investigate things further.

Re How do I check what my GPU driver supports?
Go to the homepage of your GPU manufacturer (e.g. nvidia.com, amd.com, etc), download the driver for your GPU (it's allowed to use google to find out which GPU you're using ;) ) and install it.
Re I am not going to disable Norton Antivirus
You can just disable it, try to open UserPrefs and then enable again. However, I doubt this will help, so if you're really concerned about doing this, we can skip this for now.
Re The builds in the download site say “Use at your own risk.” I do not want to take the risk
These builds are built daily so they contain latest developments. The risk this brings is that they may not be as stable as releases, meaning they could crash or have more bugs. They may not be suited for use in production where stability is important, that's why we put a warning on the site.
Re System Info
The system-info.txt is opened in Blenders text editor. Just change a window into a text editor and choose the system-info.txt from the menu in the text editor header.
How do I launch Blender from the command line?
Let's skip that for now (although I'm sure google would be able to find an answer here too).

I find your legitimacy in question. No decent person would tell me to turn off my antivirus.

We had reports about crashes that were caused by anti-virus software which thought Blender (or some part of it) was a virus and killed it during startup, e.g. T43234.

Gentlemen:
Since I can get around the problem by the menu that is brought up by clicking on the icon in the lower left corner (or upper left corner in some cases) of the editor, this is a low priority bug for me. In fact, if I have to wait until the next major release, that would be acceptable.
I am happy to report that the version of OpenGL is 2.1.0 - Build 8.15.10.1968
I have attached the system information file.
I now know how to get to the command line by typing CMD at the start menu and I went to the directory with Blender.exe with no problem and I did what you said, I typed ‘blender.exe --debug-cycles’. Then anticipating what you might want, I exited Blender by selecting User Preferences in the file menu which not surprisingly failed and exited blender. Here is the message I got in the command window (I’m pretty slick, don’t you think? :-)

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\Ruben>cd C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender

C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender>dir
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 3A8D-EC20

Directory of C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender

08/16/2015 06:42 PM <DIR> .
08/16/2015 06:42 PM <DIR> ..
08/16/2015 06:41 PM <DIR> 2.75
07/29/2014 11:50 AM 17,146,295 avcodec-55.dll
07/29/2014 11:50 AM 247,327 avdevice-55.dll
07/29/2014 11:50 AM 1,735,518 avformat-55.dll
07/29/2014 11:50 AM 343,055 avutil-52.dll
07/08/2015 10:39 AM 88,308,736 blender-app.exe
07/01/2015 02:59 PM 485,376 blender.exe
07/08/2015 10:39 AM 34,343,424 blenderplayer.exe
07/29/2014 11:44 AM 100,864 BlendThumb64.dll
07/31/2014 04:39 PM 4,875 copyright.txt
07/31/2014 04:39 PM 18,337 GPL-license.txt
07/29/2014 11:24 AM 2,375,168 libsndfile-1.dll
07/31/2014 04:39 PM 5,047 LICENSE-bfont.ttf.txt
07/31/2014 04:39 PM 3,511 LICENSE-bmonofont-i18n.ttf.txt
07/31/2014 04:39 PM 3,383 LICENSE-droidsans.ttf.txt
10/04/2013 11:58 PM 660,128 msvcp120.dll
10/04/2013 11:58 PM 963,232 msvcr120.dll
12/26/2014 05:21 PM 797,305 OpenAL32.dll
07/29/2014 11:45 AM 1,221,632 OpenColorIO.dll
07/29/2014 11:30 AM 246,784 pthreadVC2.dll
07/31/2014 04:39 PM 2,445 Python-license.txt
12/07/2014 07:21 PM 4,033,024 python34.dll
07/08/2015 10:39 AM 6,289 readme.html
11/13/2014 03:49 PM 1,190,400 SDL2.dll
12/07/2014 07:14 PM 673,280 sqlite3.dll
07/29/2014 11:50 AM 446,267 swscale-2.dll
10/04/2013 11:58 PM 137,376 vcomp120.dll

26 File(s)    155,499,078 bytes
 3 Dir(s)  364,465,975,296 bytes free

C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender>blender.exe --debug-cycles
Read new prefs: C:\Users\Ruben\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.75\c
onfig\userpref.blend
AL lib: (EE) UpdateDeviceParams: Failed to set 44100hz, got 48000hz instead
Warning! Unable to find a pixel format that supports WGL_SWAP_COPY_ARB. Substitu
ting one that uses WGL_SWAP_UNDEFINED_ARB.
found bundled python: C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.75\python
Warning! Unable to find a pixel format that supports WGL_SWAP_COPY_ARB. Substitu
ting one that uses WGL_SWAP_UNDEFINED_ARB.
Error: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION

C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender>

That's all for now.
Ruben Glueck

Here is the system information file.

Does this happen with any new window being opened? For example, does this happen when you go to View -> Duplicate Area to New Window ?

Indeed it does. 'Duplicate Area to New Window' on windows that happen to have a View menu exits Blender.

This sounds like an old bug with shared contexts on intel cards which used to crash with multiple windows opened.

Did you try downloading opengl32.dll from ftp://ftp.blender.org/sergey/softwaregl/ and put it next to blender.exe? That would give us good indication whether it's indeed video driver issue or not.

We've made nice progress. The bug disappears when I put the file next to blender.exe

Are we done? Will keeping this file in with Blender.exe slow down the use of blender?

It's indeed video driver issue then, which si quite tricky to solve without being able to reproduce the issue locally. Will move to the OpenGL errors tracker now.

@Antonis Ryakiotakis (psy-fi), i've been fixing very similar issue with Intel cards and shared OpenGL contexts a while ago, are all those changes still active after the OpenGL context refactor commits?

@Aaron Carlisle (Blendify), we appreciate your help in triaging the reports, but sometimes you're too much up to it :) The report was explicitly moved from BF Blender to GPU / Viewport project. It would also help if you happen to be in IRC so we can give feedback about such cases.