[FIXED] Calling savefig() multiple times causes crash of Spyder IDE / IPython Kernel dying

Issue

EDIT 2: The issue is resolved. It was entirely caused by the bad Windows 10 Pro v. 1809 Update. Apparently that particular version should not have been released in the first place. We just rolled back the update and everything is working again. Thanks to everyone for your efforts anyways.

EDIT: I moved the bug report to the matplotlib Github. The bug is reproducible executing the *.py file from the command prompt. It's important to note here, that it only occurs for the *.png file format, so I'll just be using *.jpg until the issue is fixed (might happen with the next windows update?).

Bug summary

Calling savefig() multiple times causes crash of Spyder IDE / IPython Kernel dying. The first time, the image is usually saved and sometimes even a couple more times, but eventually it causes a crash. Weirdly sometimes, Spyder just closes right away without an error message and other times it says "Kernel died. Restarting".

Yesterday everything still worked fine, today after a Windows update savefig started causing these problems. The issue is independent of the target directory. After it occurred fist, I updated everything through conda, but unfortunately that didn't help.

Does anyone have the same problem, especially after the latest Windows update? I'm happy about any suggestions, thanks in advance.

Code for reproduction

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

for i in range(10):
    x=[1,2,3]
    y=[3,4,5]

    plt.figure()
    plt.plot(x,y)
    plt.savefig('test{0:0d}.png'.format(i))

System info:

• OS: Windows 10 Pro (64 bit) v.1809 installed on october 5th, 2018, build 17763.1
• Python version: 3.6.6
• Spyder version: 3.3.1
• IPython version: 7.0.1
• Matplotlib version: 3.0.0

Solution

The issue is resolved. It was entirely caused by the bad Windows 10 Pro v. 1809 Update. Apparently that particular version should not have been released in the first place. We just rolled back the update and everything is working again. Thanks to everyone for your efforts anyways.

Answered By - Richard