Spyder crashes at start: UnicodeDecodeError
Question: During a Spyder session my Linux froze. After startup, I could not start
Spyder; I got the following error instead:

    
    
    (trusty)dreamer@localhost:~$ spyder
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/bin/spyder", line 2, in <module>
        from spyderlib import start_app
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/start_app.py", line 13, in <module>
        from spyderlib.config import CONF
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/config.py", line 736, in <module>
        subfolder=SUBFOLDER, backup=True, raw_mode=True)
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/userconfig.py", line 215, in __init__
        self.load_from_ini()
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/userconfig.py", line 260, in load_from_ini
        self.readfp(configfile)
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 324, in readfp
        self._read(fp, filename)
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 479, in _read
        line = fp.readline()
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 690, in readline
        return self.reader.readline(size)
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 545, in readline
        data = self.read(readsize, firstline=True)
      File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 492, in read
        newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)
    UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xfe in position 2: invalid start byte
    (trusty)dreamer@localhost:~$ 
    

I have found [this
solution](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36958189/spyder-unicode-decode-
error-in-startup), which sounds very much like my problem, but am curious if
there are others, and whether anyone knows why this occurred.


Answer: My guess is that your spyder configuration file somehow got corrupted. This is
the file `spyder.ini`, which resides in a directory like `~/.spyder2` (the
exact name of the directory depends on the version you have installed). Maybe
the encoding of the configuration file changed or a Unicode byte order mark
was somehow introduced.

Possible solutions: use an editor to convert the file back to UTF-8; delete
the configuration file; delete the whole directory containing the
configuration file. The last two obviously delete any changes you made to the
configuration.

