I observe that a significant fraction of the help requests, both here and in the old support.RStudio.com forum, have to do with fully or partially unresponsive RStudio sessions. Some hang occasionally, some indefinitely; sometimes it is the whole system, other times (as in my recent and still unanswered help request below) it is just one pane or function.
I imaging the RStudio folks have by now troubleshooted (troubleshot?) a large enough number of these cases to have accumulated some general wisdom about this -- things to try, diagnostic techniques, ways to figure out if the problem is with R or RStudio, and so forth. Is there is an RStudio-level equivalent of R's sessionInfo?
Maybe it would even be worth a pinned thread? What do you think?
One place to start would be by linking to those posts here. This isn't to say that actually including information as you've described it wouldn't be helpful— just a springboard.
We've actually written up a fair number of docs about troubleshooting different issues in RStudio - see here:
I will say that while figuring out exactly why a RStudio session is unresponsive can be tricky, a lot of the time the simplest and quickest fix is just to try resetting your state:
When I tried to run the windows command to open the RStudio-Desktop folder from the location above,
"%localappdata%\RStudio-Desktop" instead of opening a directory it shut down my machine. I wonder if I am misreading the "%"s. Are they supposed to be typed literally?
Strange, that definitely shouldn't shut down your machine - it's just a Windows shortcut to the \AppData\Local directory in your user folder (typically something like C:\\Users\Ian\AppData\Local\). You could try navigating there directly if you know the path to your user folder, or try enabling the view of hidden files in your Folder options and navigating there via the UI.