R - Fatal Error: Unable to open the base package

On my Windows work computer I was having a weird problem where R would break after I restarted my computer. The basics of the problem were: I installed a new version of R, version 4.2.2 to be exact, R would work until I would restart my computer. After that when I started R it would crash I would get an error Fatal Error: Unable to open base package. For weeks I googled around and most of what I could find had to do Rstudio not finding the right version of R. Based on what I found I deleted all of my .Rprofile and .Renviron files that I could find. I deleted all the old versions of R on my machine. Nothing worked. I reinstalled R version 4.2.2 like 5 times. Still the same problem. I even installed R on an external hard drive because I thought that my work proxy was doing something weird.

Exasperated I reached out on Mastadon:

And behold, the hive mind found the problem.

The problem was that I had old versions of R in my registry keys. Part of the problem was that I had been deleting my old versions of R and not uninstalling them. You can manually delete your registry keys by Start>Run and typing "regetit" and hitting OK. I could not do this because my Work IT folks blocked me from even viewing the keys to see if they were the problem. Lucky for me I hadn't deleted the old version sof R from my recycle bin. I restored them and uninstalled each one including the most recent version. I restarted then reinstalled R and haven't had the problem since.

Thanks to those who lent a hand on Mastadon.