Two previous community posts are about R sessions crashing when navigating in the file panel of RStudio IDE.
The topics did not appear to ever receive an answer to what was causing the crashes, so I am proposing the cause: cloud-synced folders.
When navigating to files using the RStudio file pane, I experience R session crashes 100% of the time that the file to which I'm navigating is in a cloud-synced folder. My experience is that when Google Drive File Stream or Box Drive are running, and I try navigating with the file pane, the session crashes. When these cloud-syncing services are closed and not running on my machine, I experience 0% crashes from the RStudio file pane.
Something is inhibiting the access of files that are being synced. That is where the bug is. Previous community posts about this (linked) make no mention of their use of Google Drive, Box Drive, etc, but I'd be willing to bet that is a detail they overlooked.
This is great detail, thank you. What version of RStudio are you using? It sounds related to this bug: https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues/7652, which was fixed in 1.3-apricot-nasturtium in Sept, and is also fixed in the current 1.4 preview. Could you try the latest 1.4 and see if the problem still occurs?