"Missing essential plugins: Pythonid" after installing PyCharm professional 2019.3

Question

After installing 2019.3 on Windows as an upgrade from 2019.2, I am greeted with this message:

I reinstalled PyCharm from scratch, and am still hitting the same error. Any idea what could have gone wrong and how to fix it?

(As a work-around, uninstalling 2019.3 and reinstalling 2019.2.5 works.)

Answer 1

The problem is caused by the disabled YAML plugin. See the relevant ticket in the PyCharm's bug tracker https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-38866. Basically you need to re-enable the plugin.

Remove org.jetbrains.plugins.yaml from

• macOS: ~/Library/Preferences/PyCharm2019.3/disabled_plugins.txt
• Ubuntu: ~/.PyCharm2019.3/config/disabled_plugins.txt
• Windows: C:\Users\<USER>\.PyCharm2019.3\config\disabled_plugins.txt