Hopefully, someone out there has found a solution to this "all too common" problem within Maya software. I wanted to share some information I think might be relevant to help in solving this issue.
According to this video on YouTube, if you happened to save your project in the ASCII format (.ma), there may have been some corruption in your scene file upon saving. Which in turn, when you subsequently go to reopen the file, it may not load, or it loads as an empty file. a.k.a corrupted. How does this help, you ask? Well, normally when errors happen, they get logged in the script editor, sometimes as warnings, sometimes as crash details at the time of the last operation(s) in which Maya attempts to save before crashing and thus generating a crash file one can possibly recover the latest bits of data/work from (located in the %temp% folder somewhere, usually in that folders root). What can you do when Maya just force closes though, and no crash recovery file was generated? Well, if you happen to have the program ATOM installed (script editor) or understand how to use any other script editor application to troubleshoot issues, you may be anle to "correct" some data corruption by replacing missing data (viewable in Maya's script editor window) so that you can properly load a corrupt scene file and thus being able to continue your work. I'd be willing to bet that to some extent, this type of data correction may also be of use within Maya's preferences files which are also scripts and config files, loaded at launch, which are causing the evident crash/Freeze when attempting to switch between shelves menu's.
I too am experiencing this issue and I'm trying to solve it too. So far, this is about the most relevant information I found that aproximates a possible solution. As I noticed this happened with several of the shelf menu's. I'm open to suggestions/corrections/etc.
Update: to quickly resolve this problem I went ahead and located the directory where Maya keeps its config files upon launch (Documents > Maya > "version" > prefs), including the shelves files, which are ".mel" extention files. Then I went ahead and renamed the "prefs" folder as "prefs_old" and then relaunched Maya. It then asks to choose if you want to create a new default set of preferences or if you want to import pre-existing ones in the event you ever had or have previous versions of Maya installed. I chose new defaults and then proceeded to set my project folder and reopen a scene. Time of truth came, I tried navigating between shelf tabs and encountered no issues now and my scene was intact. Honestly this if more of a classic workaround rather than a fix, but it works. So give it a go. If you really want to troubleshoot, compare new settings preferences folder to the old in a script editor and locate which data is different. It may have been written as a null bit of info or some other missing data tag that's preventing the click-over to another tab.
