Gary,
Welcome to the club. Although switching to Outlook may differentiate your situation from mine, I’ve seen PSCS abort for seemingly no reason as well. In my case, it seemed I could most often trigger the problem by accessing Photoshop Help, which in turn opens Internet Explorer. I mention this only because at least IE could be some tie-in with your situation with Outlook. But, even when changing my default browser from IE to Netscape 7, I still duplicated the problem. While I feel there is a problem with Photoshop CS, I’ve been unable to pin it down through any efforts of troubleshooting. I’m now in the process of rebuilding a clean software installation on my system, including a low-level drive format. So, that will give me 30 days of PS CS use again prior to requiring activation and more time yet to decide if PS CS is going to be worth having before I consider selling it. I’m hopeful some bizzare software conflict was the cause of the problem and that this software reinstall corrects the problem. It isn’t likely of much use to you, but if you want to review some long postings on my PSCS problems, the links follow below:
Daryl Pritchard "PS CS: Should MSVCRT.DLL & SHFOLDER.DLL be in root directory?" 11/19/03 2:05am </cgi-bin/webx?13/8>
Mike Flood "Runtime error R6025" 11/18/03 1:16am </cgi-bin/webx?13/2> Daryl Pritchard "PS CS: (Problem Duplicated!) Help Menu = Close Photoshop?" 11/16/03 2:30am </cgi-bin/webx?13/5>
Daryl Pritchard "PS CS: Help Menu = Close Photoshop?" 11/14/03 1:12am </cgi-bin/webx?50>
Good luck…I hope your problem is more easily identified and resolved.
Daryl
Hi – I am in the same club. My PSCS vaporizes after loading a medium PS file from the browser, then trying to save as a different name. I don’t even switch to an external program!!
So, after much trouble and tribulation, one of the last trouble shooting tips prior to getting to the "format the harddrive" which would have gotten me back to PS 7.01 was to create a new account. I was pretty skeptical!! But lo and behold PSCS no longer crashes!! Of course, I figure that Adobe owes me about 600 bucks for the 5 hours of work it took to do this!!
Christoper,
By creating a new account, do you mean that creating a new user account under Win2K/WinXP (whichever you’re using) somehow alleviated your problem with PS CS? I’d be curious as to where you learned of such a tip as a possible solution. I’d not expect a new account to make any difference unless it is actually just a difference in privileges, with the new account having Admininstrator rights while the old account was with lesser privileges.
Save yourself the grief of rebuilding from a wiped hard drive…I’ve completed that effort now over thew weekend, and it was all in vain. Photoshop CS looks to be a "POS" application from what I’m seeing, but my troubleshooting effors will continue.
Regards,
Daryl
Daryl,
Have you looked for an updated BIOS for your motherboard? I know it’s a long shot, but you never know.
Bob
Bob,
I’m running the most current BIOS. Thanks for the suggestion. What I’d really like to know is whether there are any known issues regarding hardware and the increased demands placed upon it by PS CS versus PS7, which ran like a champ (even if the slowest in the race). The nature of such a hardware impact would nearly seem to have to be related to the motherboard itself, as with known ASUS issues in the past. My SuperMicro P6DGU is a dying breed of dual PII/PIII board with the Intel 440GX chipset, but has proven a very solid, dependable board thus far. Maybe PS CS is signaling the end of its life, but I hope not, as I’m not yet where I can afford to upgrade in a manner I’d prefer.
Thanks,
Daryl
I don’t think this is hardware related. I’m running an Athlon XP on a NForce2 chipset Asus Motherboard here and also get errors which seem at least to have some connection to the CS help application.
Fresh install, no other crashes at all and I can run several stress tests ( like prime 95) forever and all is fine.
Right now the only Software that is giving me trouble and is unstable is Photoshop CS, which is really sad. Never had that much worries with PS ever since I got PS 5.0 In fact not too long ago I was praising Adobe for always delivering a such useful complex and yet rock stable tool.
Really don’t want to go back to PS7 now, since CS has some features I was wafting for desperately,but its seems I have no other choice until there is a patch for CS.
Until we get enough information to reproduce the error, there can’t be a patch.
And very few people are reporting crashes….
Hi Daryl and all…
My specific problem was very similar to yours. Configuration of my system is as follows: XP Pro
1.6 Gig w/ 756Mb Ram
2 Maxtor Drives, 120Gb & 60GbSlave Scratch
running as an administrator.
Bug creation:
Open PSCS
Open Browser
Open Std Photoshop file
Select Save As
Select folder to save
VAPORIZE Somewhere about there…
To over come the vaporize bug, I trouble shot through Adobe Technical Document 326146. All the way down it, just before we begin to get into formatting the hard drive, it talks about trying to set up an new account. So I did, gave myself the same access rights – Administrator – and reboot into the new account. Lo and behold, I no longer vaporize, and the whole thing just feels stronger" – if you know what I mean. I just wish I had been smart enough to jump to that simple solution before I went through all the hoops and loops prior to it.
So, I just ported all my documents over to the new account and have deleted the old account – a much better deal than either reformatting or vaporizing PSCS….! I have been running with this solution for about 48 hours now, and not one crash, I mean working, I got 5 hours sleep just trying to catch up on my backlog.
Best of luck!!
Chris
Hi Chris,
That sure sounds like an odd solution for a problem, especially if the both the original and the new account have admin privileges. I did try the idea out however, only to find no difference in my problem situation. I think I’ve pinned the problem down to Norton SystemWorks 2003, once one of the recent updates is installed. Uninstalling the Anti-Virus component of that suite made no difference, but one the full suite was removed, my problems with PS CS appear to have been resolved. More testing is yet to come, but I’m hopeful.
Thanks,
Daryl
Daryl,
Norton Protect (trash can) has been reported to cause problems with other software. When I installed SW 2002 I left that out on purpose and had no problems with anything.
However, a recent update started calling up MicroSoftMessenger. THAT sure played havoc with my XP-Home machine. I hunted it down and added .block to the end of all the file names in the directory. A later update reinstalled MSM.exe (how??). The problems started back & a new re-name stopped them again. I have since heard that that Microsoft product and XP do not get along too well.
You mignt want to give what I did a try. let us know if that solved the problem.
Bill
I use the Mozilla browser and email and have never had these crash problems. You might consider switching to that (or Netscape 7.1 or other mozilla variations such as Thunderbird.) They are all much better than IE anyway, especially the "Tabbed browsing" feature.
Just visit mozilla.org <
http://www.mozilla.org/> for more information.
Hi Bill,
Yes, I’m aware of the old Norton Protection problem. My own experience has been that problem went away once I moved to SW2003. With PS6 or PS7 and NSW2003, I never saw any problems with leaving Norton Protection enabled, although I debate whether that utility has ever been truly useful.
Your comment about "a recent update"…to what are you referring? I’d assume either WinXP or, more likely, IE6. I’ve never had any real problem with Windows Messenger, but I pretty much keep it disabled in any application that might launch it (Outlook, Outlook Express, others?) and invoke it only as desired when online chatting with a friend. I’m not sure if your "MSM.EXE" is a typo or not, but unless I’m confusing things myself, it is "MSMSGS.EXE" that is the Windows Messenger. I’m not certain what "MSM.EXE" is. Regardless, if one of these is the Messenger service, which can be exploited for use in sending pop-up ads, then you can disable that in the Services dialog. The other process, which I believe is related to Windows Messenger, does seem to persist as a background task whether or not Windows Messenger is open. The only way I’ve found to get rid of that is to uninstall Windows Messenger…yet I wound up reinstalling it since I know several folks to use it as their chatting tool. I’ve pretty much just come to ignore the presence of MSMSGS.EXE in my process list. Another alternative to getting rid of it is probably to apply a group policy to disallow it loading.
Charles,
While I’ve never used Mozilla, I’m quite happy with IE6 and it even led me to becoming a convert from once being exclusively a Netscape user. Although I’ve got Netscape 7.1 installed, I only use it when I want to disable JavaScript while browsing the web. The problems I saw with PS CS were independent of either IE6 or NS7 being the default browser. Whether the problem would arise if using Mozilla, I don’t know. I’ve been curious about Mozilla, so maybe I’ll check it out sometime.
Regards,
Daryl
