I was stuck with a similar issue with the latest IntelliJ Idea 2019.3, so maybe it'll help. For me the issue was with one of the plugins, uninstalling/reinstalling, cleaning caches didn't help. My steps were:
- Kill intellij, start it over
- When it's starting and about to load a project, be quick and cancel opening the project. This way you'll end up with a small window with a list of previously opened projects and a few menu items.
- Open menu > plugins, disable them all
- Restart intellij idea, open any project.
If step 4 above succeeds (which happened to me), one by one try enabling the plugins to see which one is causing error. For me it was Kubernetes plugin from JetBrains.
