LibreOffice 3.6 “Unhandled Exception” Error

I’ve just upgraded from LibreOffice 3.5.2 to 3.6.0, and ran into two sets of problems; the one documented here, and issues with Java. 

I didn’t install over my old version as I usually do, because this is noted not to work in the release notes for 3.6…

For Windows users that have LibreOffice prior to version 3.4.5 installed, either uninstall that beforehand, or upgrade to 3.4.5. Otherwise, the upgrade to 3.6.0 may fail.

…and I couldn’t find 3.5.5 anywhere on the LibreOffice site.  Also recently released by LibreOffice is 3.5.6, but documentation is poor (many links go to 3.6, not 3.5.6) and it’s unclear as to whether this will install over 3.5.2 as 3.5.5 would do, as a version waypoint for those wanting an over-old path from < 3.5.5 to 3.6

So I uninstalled LibreOffice 3.5.2 from my Windows 7 64-bit SP1 PC with 64-bit Java JRE 7.5, then installed LibreOffice 3.6, but after an initial pause on first run, every attempt to launch LibreOffice failed with this “Unhandled exception: InvalidRegistryException” error…

…followed by this “Runtime Error! This application has requested the Runtime to terminate in an unusual way.” from the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library:

Attempts to uninstall and re-install 3.5.6 or 3.6 again did not fix this issue, including after shutting down and restarting Windows.  Uninstalling the older co-installed OpenOffice (which worked fine with LibreOffice up to 3.5.2) did not make any difference, the same failure pattern remained.

I followed advice to delete my LibreOffice profile, i.e. the subtree within AppData\Roaming for LibreOffice, and that fixed the issue, which may have been linked to a language dictionary I’d added to Open Office.  I didn’t try a more refined fix (i.e. trying to isolate which part of the old profile was bad) as I didn’t need anything in the old profile; I did rename it away (while LibreOffice was completely closed, QuickStarter included) rather than delete it, in case I want to go deeper into this issue later.

Which let me get far enough to hit the Java problem (those who noted “Windows 7 64-bit with JRE 7.5 64-bit” may take a guess at the cause before reading my next post)