I am in RStudio Hell

[slante9]

Years after I started using RStudio IDE for my windows 10 computer and no problems and using stan extensively, I am all of a sudden in Hell. The ide gets stuck with several of my R and notebook files open that aren't supposed to be there and the ide stuck with a notebook message display. Tried reinstalls r and rstudio. Deleted files left and write. It all seems to have started with brm not running and trying to fix that where solutions suggested reinstalling stan from source. Things all went way downhill from there. You'd think there'd be an easy way to wipe out everything from r to and rstudio to stan, but I've tried that an am still stuck. Tell I don't have to wipe out the whole window installation.

[DavoWW]

Hi @slante9,
Welcome to the Posit/RStudio Community Forum.
This is frustrating indeed. Take a deep breath, and let's try to solve it step by step.

1. It sounds like you have the latest versions of both R and RStudio installed, so that's all good.
2. Can you start plain R from the RGui icon on your desktop? If yes, and there are no errors, then R is running OK.
3. If not, then the problem is probably due to one of the startup files causing a problem. See help("Startup"). This will involve moving these files out of the way (at least temporarily). The main files in question are .Rprofile, .Renviron, and .Rdata. You can also try running R --vanilla from the command line - this forces R to run with no startup files.
4. Once R is running OK, reinstall the package {stan} from CRAN but using the precompiled Windows binary version. This avoids any failures due to the compiling tool-chain on your local machine. install.packages("stan", dependencies=TRUE, type="win.binary").
5. Once a new intact version of {stan} is installed you can try running RStudio. If that works, try library(stan).
6. Last steps are to reconnect the startup files: first .Renviron, then .Rprofile checking for any startup errors. I would delete any old .Rdata files and, if necessary, recreate them from code.

I hope this helps.