There is an important patch that we wanted to make sure you are aware of… If you are experiencing crashes when opening Shapefiles, make sure you get this patch (Knowledge Base Article 41680).
At ArcGIS 10.2 there is a shapefile issue which results in a crash. This is caused by a buffer overrun that is most likely to occur when there are large numbers of fields in the dBase file.
The patch to fix this issue is available now for ArcGIS 10.2 for Desktop, Engine and Server users.