Whether it would help this issue or not, I’m not sure, but after resetting your preferences and re-establishing where your scratch disk location for PS is, I suggest you check that location to be sure there is adequate free space available. Ditto for Lightroom’s scratch disk or temporary directory, if it has such a thing. If you are having to hard-restart (presume you mean you are killing the processes in Task Manager), then you may well have many remnants – and potentially sizable ones – of working files left in those directory areas, and getting rid of them will free up some needed resources.
Regards,
Daryl
I would also suggest, after following the above listed recommendations, that you defrag all of your drives. Since you are having some issues with both PS and LR, it might be wise to run Diskcheck, especially on your C:\. You’ll probably have to "schedule" this for the next boot-up, but there could be issues there, or little "nasties" lurking ready to strike. It’ll take a reboot, and some time (go get another cup of coffee), but might save you from encountering problems down the road.
If these suggestions do not fix your problems, I’d look to issues with your I/O system (Input/Output, basically translating to hard drives and controllers). Back when only SCSI’s were fast, I/O issues were more common. Still, they do occur, and can cause some really odd behavior. Look also at any Windows’ "delayed write," and buffering settings, that you might have. Basically, they are a vestige of older, slower HDD’s, and are not likely to be needed nowadays. Usually with these, Event Viewer will have listings for read/write issues on that/those HDD(s). Check Event Viewer, both Applications tab and System tab, to see if you have any error messages there. That’s the first place I look, when I have any sort of application error, hang, or odd behavior. You might get lucky and have an error message that you can actually make sense of!
Good luck,
Hunt
