Posted on Sunday 19th of August 2007 at 12:54 in Software

Someone help me, what is wrong with my CS3!?!

I had the exact same problem with my CS2 but upgraded to CS3 anyway and I'm suffering hurrendous instability issues once more in the most random ways. I thought it was just a slightly dodgy CS2 install but I did a fresh install for CS3 and things are as random as they were before. Let me explain...

I'm happily running Windows XP Professional SP2 (fully legal I might add) and have been on this install for a year or two (since I upgraded at the start of 2006). I was running CS2 for quite some time and it was largely okay but it gradually developed some artificial intelligence. Unfortunately CS3 has inherited the same characteristics that I shall now explain:

Random crashing
Occasionally it'll just decide to crash out faster than you could opt to quit the application. It'll throw a memory error and crash to desktop. It's not consistent but it does happen at frustratingly regular intervals. My memory is fine, memtest is okay and no other (non-adobe) applications crash out in this way.

Disliking other applications
Photoshop CS2 refused to work properly when Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 was open; it would refuse to open new documents on the most part. Sometimes it would refuse to show menus correctly too, leaving off "okay" buttons and textboxes to enter dimensions for stuff. It's hard to explain so I'll show you:



That's what happens when Photoshop takes offense to something that I have open and I try to create a new document (for example). Once I've closed the offending application (in this instance it was upset about Filezilla) then it performs slightly better. There's no real pattern to the applications it dislikes; sometimes it's Filezilla, othertimes Opera... It's just bizarre!

Computer-wide effects
Yesterday while working on some designs for a project Photoshop was able to stop right clicking from working in every other application on the machine (apart from itself), even on the desktop. I thought my mouse was broken until I closed Photoshop and normality returned.

So does anyone know what I can do to stop it performing in such an odd way? I imagine a clean install of XP would do the trick but that is not an option at all. Would cleaning my drivers help? I'm an advanced user but this bizarre behaviour is something I've never seen with anything else. The annoying thing is that I *need* Photoshop for my design needs so advise is welcome.

 

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