Can not start a new project as unity has "failed to load window layout"

Question

Clicking "load default layout" does nothing (just rerenders the alert box), clicking "revert factory settings" also does nothing.

I've googled this issue and the common solution is to reopen unity and to reimport all assests except this is a brand new project. There is nothing in it to import.

I've tried creating a new project and it still gives me this error.

I'm running version 2020.1.5f1 and the target platform is Windows 64-bit

Answer 1

Quit Unity and do the following:

• Go to "AppData\Roaming\Unity\Editor-5.x\Preferences\Layouts\default" or "~/Library/Preferences/Unity/Editor-5.x/Layouts/default" for mac, delete LastLayout.dwlt and copy Default.wlt
• Paste Default.wlt into the "Library" folder of your project
• Delete CurrentLayout-default.dwlt and rename Default.wlt to CurrentLayout-default.dwlt

Reopen Unity and load the project. The editor should open normally. You should now be able to create new projects as usual too.

Answer 2

the simple solution if it has yet to be tried would be to uninstall unity and reinstall. if you have already tried that try updating to a newer version see if unity 2020.3 works to narrow the problem down a bit more. I had the same problem for me I just updated unity to a newer version and everything worked perfectly.

Answer 3

I tried the solutions posted by @carmelo343 and @Abhishek Dubey, but it still didn't work. My solution was to create the unity project using an older version (I used 2019.3.12f1), which shouldn't cause that layout error, then change the unity version to 2020.1.5f1 in Unity Hub (see below)

Unity Hub

Answer 4

1. go to "C:\Users<username>\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Editor-5.x\Preferences\Layouts\default"
2. Copy this file in your project library folder renaming it with "CurrentLayout-default.dwlt" and replace it with the old one.

Worked for me!!