for about a month now, tf2 has been crashing upon loading into a game seemingly at random. i will load into a game up until the "sending client info" part and my game would crash once my "client info" has been sent (the game would crash before i could see that i had fully loaded into the game).

at first i assumed it was just because i had a potato pc and that's that. ran a few scans, cleaned it up a bit, and the crashes would still happen.

next, i assumed it must had been the motd. disabled the motd, and the crashes still happened.
i then verified cache and the crashes, again, continued.

through some deductive reasoning i concluded it had to have been my mumble overlay, because my game would load in whenever i wasn't in a mumble. at first this seemed to be correct; i was able to join a game that previously crashed me when i disabled mumble overlay.
now i know that isn't the case, so my final assumption has been that it's something with my hud.
have not come to a conclusion whether it's my hud or not, so i will update once i've found out

i was using ahud and the mastercomfig fps config tweaked to my personal preference
if anyone has had a similar problem or knows of any solution, please share

edit: so far it seems as if it's the hud? will update
edit: not the hud, custom folder was deleted but still crashed the same way