Problem in invoking footprint editor in KiCad V5

First you can try cleaning up the configuration and starting from scratch. See Where are the configuration files (settings, library tables)? and Library management in KiCad version 5 (section “Resetting the library tables to default settings”).

In any case this is a serious bug - KiCad shouldn’t freeze or crash under any circumstances. It would be interesting and important to know why this happens.