Fixing Amazon Photo Crashes

I've been using Amazon Photos to back up and organise my shots for several years now, but in the last month the desktop program has developed an incredibly annoying bug. It would load like normal, begin uploading any queued photos, and then after an inordinate amount of time (normally between five and fifteen minutes) it would just silently crash. No errors, no crash reports; just a sudden exit of any open windows and termination of all associated running processes. 🤷‍♂️

Over the last couple of days, I tried all the standard troubleshooting steps: updating the program; uninstalling and reinstalling; restarting the PC; running Windows Update^[1]. Nothing worked, but it did highlight a couple of consistent errors in Event Viewer:

• Just before the crash – and seemingly directly causing it – I'd get a System.OutOfMemoryException thrown by .NET;
• Immediately afterwards, an Application Error would be logged pointing at a fault in the KERNELBASE.dll module.

These proved slightly more useful as search terms, leading me to this fairly "comprehensive" debugging guide (read: chuck everything at the wall and see what sticks): MiniTool Kernelbase Fix

For my own future reference (and in case it helps anyone else), the step that ultimately proved fruitful was running the sfc/scannow terminal command. Note that you will need to be running Command Prompt with Admin rights for it to work, and that it can take quite a while to run. Still, once it had completed I was treated with a message stating that several "corrupt files" had been found and repaired. With that done, I fired up Amazon Photos again (no restarts or reinstalls necessary at this stage) and it happily chugged away for over an hour without any complaints. It's now been running in the background for the best part of a day, has fully cleared the upload backlog, and hasn't shown any sign of wavering or crashing again. Fingers crossed (🤞), but it appears to be fixed.