CS2 Adobe Help Center not responding

"Fred Athearn" wrote in message

Since I upgraded there is a problem with the help function. I can navigate to most of the items in the left hand panel OK but on some of them the process just hangs up and stops responding. With the search box any time there is a successful search it shows all the hits but the left hand panel is gray and the program is non-responsive.
I can go down a list of topics and double click on them and some of them display until I come to one the seems to call a search and hangs the help center.

The windows task manager says that the help center is running but when I go to end it says not responding and then offers to report the termination. If I just terminate the process ahc.exe it is faster and without the offer to report.

I tried going to the add/remove programs part of the control panel and repaired the Adobe Common Files Installer and then Photoshop CS2 but there was no change in the problem. Does anyone have any ideas about what to try next?

I believe Adobe’s help center is html based. Your problem may be platform dependent (Mac v9, OSX or Windows), or browser dependent (Navigator, MSIE, Mozilla, or other). In the meantime, try re-installing or upgrading MS Internet Explorer.
—

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com

"Fred Athearn" wrote in message

Since I upgraded there is a problem with the help function. I can navigate to most of the items in the left hand panel OK but on some of them the process just hangs up and stops responding. With the search box any time there is a successful search it shows all the hits but the left hand panel is gray and the program is non-responsive.
I can go down a list of topics and double click on them and some of them display until I come to one the seems to call a search and hangs the help center.

The windows task manager says that the help center is running but when I go to end it says not responding and then offers to report the termination. If I just terminate the process ahc.exe it is faster and without the offer to report.

I tried going to the add/remove programs part of the control panel and repaired the Adobe Common Files Installer and then Photoshop CS2 but there was no change in the problem. Does anyone have any ideas about what to try next?

I believe this is a WinXP SP2 problem as indicated on the Adobe site. http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/330621.html

On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 18:51:09 GMT, "Mike Russell" wrote:

"Fred Athearn" wrote in message

Since I upgraded there is a problem with the help function. I can navigate to most of the items in the left hand panel OK but on some of them the process just hangs up and stops responding. With the search box any time there is a successful search it shows all the hits but the left hand panel is gray and the program is non-responsive.
I can go down a list of topics and double click on them and some of them display until I come to one the seems to call a search and hangs the help center.

The windows task manager says that the help center is running but when I go to end it says not responding and then offers to report the termination. If I just terminate the process ahc.exe it is faster and without the offer to report.

I tried going to the add/remove programs part of the control panel and repaired the Adobe Common Files Installer and then Photoshop CS2 but there was no change in the problem. Does anyone have any ideas about what to try next?

I believe Adobe’s help center is html based. Your problem may be platform dependent (Mac v9, OSX or Windows), or browser dependent (Navigator, MSIE, Mozilla, or other). In the meantime, try re-installing or upgrading MS Internet Explorer.

It does not look like Internet Explorer is running at all when the Adobe Help Center is active. The program the involved is called ahc.exe and is located located at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help Center.

A web search on "ahc.exe" led to me finding Adobe Support Knowledge base document 319210 at
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/319210.html

This describes a problem a lot like the one that I have, but not quite.

So I am looking at:

Solution 1: Verify that the Help content files exist, then delete the Adobe Help Center database and cache files.

In fact I do have the zipped files mentioned in the correct place which is to say: Photoshop_9.0_en-us.zip (as well as
Indesign_4.0_en-us.zip) are to be found in
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help Center\Adobe\Packages

So 319210 says that what I should next do is

2. Delete the contents of the Cache folder (not the folder itself) in the following location:
— On Windows: Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Help Center/AdobeHelpData
— On Mac OS: Library/Application Support/Adobe/AdobeHelpData

3. Delete the adobeassistance folder in the following location:

— On Windows: Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Help Center/AdobeHelpData/Database
— On Mac OS: Library/Application Support/Adobe/AdobeHelpData/Database.

4. Manually launch the Adobe Help Center:

— On Windows: Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Help Center/ahc.exe
— On Mac OS: Application/Adobe Help Center

I just did this whole thing and when I launched ah.exec directly it spent a long time unpacking the help files for Indesign CS2 and PhotoshopCS2 but no luck.

On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 22:22:04 -0500, Fred Athearn
wrote:

I just did this whole thing and when I launched ah.exec directly it spent a long time unpacking the help files for Indesign CS2 and PhotoshopCS2 but no luck.

I had a long talk with the Adobe support guy and he had me down load a new version of the zipped up CS2 English help file from the support>downloads Adobe page and replace the existing one with it and then clear the catch etc as before. That looked like it was going to work, but after a few clicks it hung in the same way. After trying starting the system via MSCONFIG set to load only MS things the same thing was happening.

My guy is going to consult his people and get back today.

BTW I thought I had fixed the thing myself late last night when I went back to support>downloads and found a just-released a few days ago 2.1 upgrade to Adobe Help Center. I down loaded and installed it and it looked at first like it was going to work, but after successfully displaying a few topics it hung up with "operation could not be completed" in just the same way as before. I will post again when I hear back from support.

(BTW I am so far really pleased with the response I got on this from Adobe even though it has not worked yet. This is clearly not an easy fix and you can’t expect the first guy you talk to some evening will have all the answers on something hard, but he made it clear he would go to school on this and call me back today.)