Spyder crashes at start: UnicodeDecodeError

During a Spyder session my Linux froze. After startup, I could not start Spyder; I got the following error instead: (trusty)dreamer@localhost:~$ spyder Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/bin/spyder", line 2, in <module> from spyderlib import start_app File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/start_app.py", line 13, in <module> from spyderlib.config import CONF File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/config.py", line 736, in <module> subfolder=SUBFOLDER, backup=True, raw_mode=True) File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/userconfig.py", line 215, in __init__ self.load_from_ini() File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages/spyderlib/userconfig.py", line 260, in load_from_ini self.readfp(configfile) File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 324, in readfp self._read(fp, filename) File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 479, in _read line = fp.readline() File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 690, in readline return self.reader.readline(size) File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 545, in readline data = self.read(readsize, firstline=True) File "/home/dreamer/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 492, in read newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xfe in position 2: invalid start byte (trusty)dreamer@localhost:~$ I have found this solution, which sounds very much like my problem, but am curious if there are others, and whether anyone knows why this occurred.