I have the same problem. I’m pretty sure this started after my latest Windows update but I haven’t been digging further into that.

Event viewer says something that Qt5Core_fme.dll is crashing.

Just spamming button to start it usually allows at least one instance to start it though so that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been digging further into this.

Edit: Also this seems to happen with other versions of FME, and on other machines.

Considering that it is now 2025, FME 2018 is 7 years old (and Safe only supports up to 3 versions back). I would not be surprised at all if an OS update is at the root of this and would strongly recommend to update to the latest version.

Hi everyone, 

We have received multiple reports of this issue and are currently working on it! We’ll share updates as soon as we have more information or a resolution.

As ​@redgeographics mentioned, FME Form 2018 is 7 years old, and compatibility issues, such as those between Qt5 and newer Windows updates, can happen over time. This is a known challenge with older versions of Qt becoming less compatible with modern system environments.

An FME upgrade would be recommended, as FME Form 2018 is now considered a retired version of our products according to our Product Support Policy. Here is our FME Community article, which lists all of our official releases with release dates, for reference. If there are questions on our Product Support Policy and the identified scope, please don't hesitate to ask!

Thank you, 

Emma

Hi everyone,

Our team was able to narrow down the issue to a recent update made to one of our packages on FME Hub.
 
We’ve since applied a fix, and you can manually push the update by following these steps (though we still highly recommend an upgrade!):

• On the machine running FME 2019 or earlier, go to:
  • C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Safe Software\FME (refer to the attached image)
• Delete the catalogXXXX.json file of the affected Workbench (you might need to enable Hidden Items under View tab). This will force Workbench to download the newly updated JSON file when you start it.
• Launch the affected FME Workbench.

Note: If the affected version of Workbench has not been opened in the past 24 hours, the update should be applied automatically the next time you open Workbench, and you should not need to follow the steps above.
 
Please let us know if Workbench still crashes after trying this fix.
We are here to help if any other questions come up!

Thank you,

Emma

While what you are suggesting is of course the best if that’s possible, in practice it’s not possible for us since we are locked to 2018 for quite some time due to architectural reasons and I have no influence over that.

Anyway, I saw the other comments that it seems to be fixed now. I just started different versions of FME and it seems to work perfectly so far. Thanks for the quick fix. :)