Legal
The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Search
March 11, 2008
A tip on Photoshop Mac stability
According to an Adobe tech note, it's possible that the Adobe Version Cue CS3 3.1.0 update won't get installed correctly, leading to a damaged framework file that can cause Photoshop to crash. To fix the problem, you can download this small updater and run it. If you're not able to run the script (e.g. you don't have admin privileges on your machine), you can go into Photoshop preferences (Cmd-K), then go into File Handling and uncheck "Enable Version Cue." The tech note mentions other Adobe CS3 apps, but I've tried the fix only with Photoshop. In any event running the updater is a good idea.
Comments
Hi John, this is not an isolated or rare problem. I've personally experienced it on a handful of machines and have been hosting a fairly high-traffic solutions post since last August:
Fixing CS3: All apps crash when saving
I'm glad to see Adobe addressing this, there is a growing discontent among Adobe's users largely due to horrible installation experiences and general maintenance issues with CS3.
[Sorry about that, Joe (and everyone). Man, it just kills us when something like this rears up and casts a shadow over all the good stuff. It's like the Howard Dean scream: a gaffe that comes to detract from everything else. At least we've been able to find the cause of the problem & to suggest some very simple fixes. --J.]
John-
I've got a MacBook Pro with CS3 Web Premium. I've run into stability issues with CS3 from the beginning, as well as slow launching and quitting (in fact, often crashing instead of quitting). Unfortunately, I tried the fix you mentioned, but it did nothing for me.
Then, even though I rarely have the save problems he mentions, I tried deleting Version Cue 3.1.0 and renaming 3.0.0, as described in Joe's post and LIKE MAGIC, my problems seem to have disappeared. I even had Version Cue turned off in Photoshop, but it was still causing me problems. Now all my CS3 applications act like they should. Photoshop and Bridge launch in a third of the time they were taking to launch.
What an easy fix that was. I just wish, for others sake, that this was more widely disseminated information. I've never seen mention of Version Cue as a culprit on the Adobe forums, for instance. I was obsessively careful about installing CS3, so there must be some sort of issue with Version Cue, the installer, or both.
-Ron
PS: Thanks for putting out such a great blog, and congratulations, Dad!
In the old, now-distant days when the Bridge engineers were active on the Bridge forums, their suggested solution to a variety of Bridge problems was to disable Version Cue.
Thus, the problems with V.C. certainly predate the 3.1.0 update.
Now that Gunar Penikis is no longer a Bridge manager, to whom can we turn to beg them the remaining, substantial bugs in Bridge 2.1.1.9?
As it is now, we either put up with with soft previews in Bridge, or, if we enable "High-quality previews", we suffer the spurious thumbnails and previews from totally unrelated folders. Images can get lost easily if they are inadvertently deleted by the user thinking they are the images corresponding to the spurious thumbnails and previews.
Both issues have been discussed with Bridge Engineers, both publicly on the Bridge Macintosh forum and by private emails. Many months have now gone by and the issues persist.
Bridge is thus only of very limited use. The concep of the application is spectacularly brilliant, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
If it is within your power to do something about it (it sounds like the engineers are being frustrated by the bean counters in their ability to help), it would be tremendously helpful to Photoshop as a professional application.
Thanks in advance.
One more persistent Bridge bug, even in 2.1.1.9 (Mac): The global purge cache command in Bridge preferences is broken. Running it causes the cache NOT to rebuild properly; for instance, the "Date Created" line under each thumbnail in the Contents pane is lost and it does NOT return, like the other info lines do. The solution is to purge the cache for each folder, one by one, through the Tools menu in Bridge.
Cache management is the Achilles heel of the application.
All of the above has been discussed with Bridge engineers, publicly and privately.
Hello John, I've had contact with Adobe support on this repeatedly. What really annoyed me is that support never contacted me again when this fix was released.
Luckily I discovered Joe's page. The tipp published there was the only one that did help.
At the moment all CS3 apps work fine, but I don't dare to run the Adobe Updater.