Claude: Go ahead and tell me what you're seeing (timestamp, source, any details in the entry), and I'll help figure out what it means.

ME: Faulting application name: shotcut.exe, version: 26.9.6.0, time stamp: 0x6a9d29bb
Faulting module name: libmlt-7.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x6a9d2763
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000028953
Faulting process id: 0x37C4
Faulting application start time: 0x1DD442FD62763C4
Faulting application path: C:\Users\jonra\Desktop\Desktop 1029 August 2026\shotcut-win64-26.9.6\Shotcut\shotcut.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Users\jonra\Desktop\Desktop 1029 August 2026\shotcut-win64-26.9.6\Shotcut\libmlt-7.dll
Report Id: af4e7f79-6fec-4d0f-9e85-2952025dae7f
Faulting package full name: 
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Claude: Pinpointing likely causes and version mismatch clues.
That's a genuine crash — and it changes the read a bit from what I said earlier.

Exception code 0xc0000005 is a classic access violation (segfault): the app tried to read or write memory it shouldn't have. This wasn't a graceful shutdown after all — the Application::~Application exiting line in the log was just the tail end of Windows/Qt tearing the process down after the fault, not a clean voluntary exit.

Faulting module: libmlt-7.dll — this is important. That's MLT itself, the core video/timeline engine Shotcut is built on (not a plugin, not a codec, not one of those VST DLLs we saw warnings about earlier). So this points to a bug in MLT's native code, not something in your project files or a misbehaving third-party plugin.

Putting this together with what the log showed:

The crash happened right after MLT finished generating audio waveforms for the second clip and you then dragged/moved that clip on the timeline (an overwrite + reposition on the same video track).
That sequence — background waveform-generation task finishing right as you interact with/move the same clip — is a classic pattern for this kind of crash: a race between a background thread still touching the clip's producer object and the UI thread modifying the timeline at the same moment, causing MLT to dereference a stale/invalid pointer.
A couple of things worth noting and trying:

Your installed version is 26.9.6, but the in-app "Checking for upgrade" call reported the latest stable release as 26.8.1 — meaning 26.9.6 is a newer, likely pre-release/nightly build. Nightly builds are more prone to exactly this kind of native crash. It may be worth switching to the stable 26.8.1 release and seeing if the crash still occurs.
As a workaround, try waiting until the "Done generating audio waveforms" status message appears (i.e., let background tasks fully finish) before dragging or repositioning a clip you just added.
This is genuinely worth reporting: Shotcut's GitHub issue tracker would want exactly this info (faulting module libmlt-7.dll, exception 0xc0000005, version 26.9.6.0) plus the steps that trigger it — it looks like a real, reproducible bug rather than something on your end.