Tons of Pshop CS3 problems — all fixed when CS2 Removed

C
Posted By
creativepart
Jun 27, 2007
Views
224
Replies
9
Status
Closed
I’m running CS3 on Vista and in Photoshop I’ve had big problems with:

1. Flashing cursor
2. File>Open Recent didn’t work
3. File>Device Central (load error message)
4. SLOW menu access when starting PShop
5. Unable to access layers sometimes and getting error sounds

I did get the unable to load FastCore and MMX plugin messages but relized they were coming from CS2 (or even PShop 7) and removed them. But I noticed today that when looking at my Plugins there were duplicates for just about all of them.

So, today I renamed my CS2 folder (PhotoShop CS2 is still installed as I didn’t know what to do about deactivating it) just so CS3 couldn’t find and load any CS2 Plugins and it solved all my problems.

Suddenly, Open Recent worked. The flashing cursor went away. And menus became available right away.

I realize I can just setup CS3 to not look for CS2 plugins, but I used the renaming method for a quick test.

Look in your CS3 Help>About Plug-in do you see a bunch of duplicated Plugins? Try renaming your old Plugin folder and see if this fixes your problems.

Paul Green
Related Tags
fix problems remove

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JJ
John_Joslin
Jun 27, 2007
I have CS, CS2 and CS3 all installed and working without any problems.
C
creativepart
Jun 27, 2007
Do you have the Plug-ins preference in CS3 to look for Plug-ins in previous installs? I did — it seemed like a good idea — but that’s what caused all my problems.

Paul Green
JJ
John_Joslin
Jun 27, 2007
Do you have the Plug-ins preference in CS3 to look for Plug-ins in previous installs?

No. In fact some people advise strongly against such a practice so I didn’t.

Some plug-ins need to be installed under the new Ps version to work properly, others won’t work anyway.
C
creativepart
Jun 27, 2007
I posted this so that others experiencing similar issues could check and see if this could be the cause of their problems on their computers.

I’m not sure where I got the idea at pointing CS3 to my CS2 Plug-in folder was a good idea, but it seemed like it at the time. Seems like common sense now… but at the time I thought "Oh, cool."

Paul Green
MV
Mathias_Vejerslev
Jun 28, 2007
It’s good practise to create a separate folder for PS plugins (for instance C:/PSPLUGINS that you can direct PS to through preferences. That way you wont have to re-install them again when you upgrade.
JJ
John_Joslin
Jun 28, 2007
Doesn’t that leave the possibility open that some older plug-ins may cause errors with newer versions of Photoshop?
MV
Mathias_Vejerslev
Jun 28, 2007
Sure. But those plug-ins likely wouldn’t work with the newest version anyway… (Are we talking specific, known plug-ins here?)
JJ
John_Joslin
Jun 28, 2007
No, just remembering various conflicts and errors that have cropped up here over the years. Many are traced back to plug-ins.
DG
Dana_Gartenlaub
Jun 28, 2007
I have always had a seperate plugins folder for third party stuff. It just seems to make sense, so you don’t have to re-install plugins when you update.

I do, however, sometimes get an error message that Photoshop can’t start Bridge (when set to do so). Sometimes it does it anyway. Strange.

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