Abnormal program termination of Photoshop 7

I share a computer with my 16 year old daughter, who is an enthusiastic Photoshop 7 user, seriously thinking about graphic art as a career. The computer’s a Pentium 4 machine, with 1 GB of RAM. She has her virtual desktop, separate (thank heavens!) from mine.
This arrangement has worked fine for a year and a half (or longer). Unfortunately, as of yesterday, she has been experiencing a problem that’s beyond my ability to fix. I’m unable to pinpoint any potential cause; worse, I cannot come up with a solution.

Photoshop still works just fine on my desktop. On her desktop, it crashes after loading (apparently all modules do load), with the message "Unable to continue because of a hardware or software error. This error is irrecoverable." Shutting this box produces the rather obvious information "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library. Photoshop.exe. Abnormal Program Termination." No clues beyond this.
I have done the obvious things. I have reset her profile by holding Ctr-Shift-Alt when starting the program. I have used Windows System restore to retreat to a pre-disaster configuration. I have reinstalled Photoshop, having previously uninstalled it. Also, I have booted into Safe Mode, switched to her desktop, and started Photoshop.
In all instances, the program crashes with the error message above on her settings. Yet it continues to run fine on my desktop. I am a bit bewildered by this fact. I would very much appreciate any suggestions as to what might be causing the crash.

I don’t particularly want to invest time, money and resources in CS3, though that may be one possible solution.

Many thanks,

Edward.

How many programs does she have loaded and running in the background ie. icons on the bottom right of her screen versus yours? She may be out of available memory. Easiest fix = close some of those programs and consider adding memory if this fixes the problem.

Charley

Thanks, Charley. I did look at this possibility, but it was not (I think) the issue, as the program was failing in safe mode. I had her save all her files, then deleted her profile, as I think that there may well have been a corruption in her Windows settings. I then created a new desktop for her. So far so good, Photoshop now mostly behaves itself, although she has mentioned an occasional instability during some hue/saturation operations (she hasn’t been more specific). This may be unrelated to the initial problem, and I’ve reset her profile again to see if that problem goes away.

At the very least, it was an opportunity to clear up her messy workspace! I now have her saving to an auxilliary drive.
Edward

On Mon, 26 Nov 2007 12:43:57 -0500, "Charley" wrote:

How many programs does she have loaded and running in the background ie. icons on the bottom right of her screen versus yours? She may be out of available memory. Easiest fix = close some of those programs and consider adding memory if this fixes the problem.

Charley