What is the bug or the crash?
It looks like there is an issue with handling special characters (utf8) on the welcome page:

Steps to reproduce the issue
use special character in project title or file path
Versions
| QGIS version | 3.40.1-Bratislava |
| QGIS code revision | 989853a7 |
| |
| Libraries |
| Qt version | 5.15.13 |
| Python version | 3.12.7 |
| GDAL/OGR version | 3.9.3 |
| PROJ version | 9.5.0 |
| EPSG Registry database version | v11.016 (2024-08-31) |
| GEOS version | 3.13.0-CAPI-1.19.0 |
| SQLite version | 3.46.1 |
| PDAL version | 2.8.1 |
| PostgreSQL client version | 16.2 |
| SpatiaLite version | 5.1.0 |
| QWT version | 6.3.0 |
| QScintilla2 version | 2.14.1 |
| OS version | Windows 11 Version 2009 |
| |
| Active Python plugins |
| plugin_reloader | 0.17 |
| db_manager | 0.1.20 |
| grassprovider | 2.12.99 |
| MetaSearch | 0.3.6 |
| processing | 2.12.99 |
Supported QGIS version
New profile
Additional context
No response