@nerd: The problem is not the lights, its attempting to set render options that causes the crash on every scene created in previous versions. The older scenes load and render fine(but very slow compared to P13). My suspicion is that it has something to do with differences in the way adaptive sampling is implemented that resulted in faster renders, just a hunch...

Loading the old scene into a new scene cures the issue, the only reason I delete the lights from the new scene is to prevent duplicates.

Try creating a scene in P12 set render options and save to disc(or use an existing P12 scene), then open that scene in P13 and attempt to change render settings see if it works for you. If you don't have an issue I'll know its on my end, though i cant imagine how that's the case.

I've wrestled with this issue for months...Reinstalled P13 several times including uninstalling and fresh installs... after several attempts I (formatted drive)upgraded the OS from Win10 to Win11 same problem persists...

Thanks for your reply...

PS: I loaded an older scene and deleted all the lights and got the same result.

Y'all have a great day.