A fix for Photoshop 'Program Error' when opening fiiles

Dec 03, '03 10:23:00AM

Contributed by: aalegado

I posted this on the Adobe Photoshop Support forum but am posting it here, too. The original idea for the solution was taken from a hint on this site so, in effect, the hint belongs here. I solved a problem with a Photoshop 7 install running under OS X 10.3 (Panther) on a new PowerBook G4 15." I expect that this experience should apply to any Panther install and should not be specific to PowerBooks.

Problem: Files not owned by Photoshop (generic JPEGs, GIFs, Adobe Illustrator files, etc.) will not open. Photoshop will go through the motion of opening the file (e.g. display the Profile dialog or, in the case of Illustrator files, display the Rasterization Settings dialog) but will fail to open the file and display a dialog stating that the file cannot be opened due to a "Program Error". Files are opened by several means: Via the application's "Open" command, drag-and-dropped onto the Dock icon, and Control-Click then Open-With in the Finder.

Files that are owned by Photoshop open fine. By "owned" I do not mean in the Unix permissions sense but in the owner application sense, i.e., if Get Info on the file the application listed under "Kind" is Photoshop. The problem files previously worked with this installation of Photoshop and the user reported that "This just started happening." No OS updates or software installs had occured before onset of the problem.

Other Adobe applications work fine, as do all other applications in general on this machine. File corruption and/or disk problems were not expected given the age of the machine and the amount of use it has had since first-use. These files are all maintained locally on the machine as the user normally works in a stand-alone environment.

I created a new user on this machine and logged in as that user. In this user account, Photoshop behaves correctly, implying that the problem is user-specific which indicts preference files as opposed to something systemic or application-specific. I deleted all Photoshop preference files I could find in ~username/Library but this did not solve the problem. The "Fast User Switching" was a great help in this process since I could very quickly switch back-and-forth between accounts as I tested various corrective actions.

Solution: I renamed the Library folder of the problem user account to "Library Old". Any name will work as long as it is different from "Library". Logged-out and logged-in, and the system re-created the Library folder. At this point, the account had lost almost all personalization and/or configuration settings, but Photoshop's operation was restored to normal. After verifying Photoshop's operation, I rebuilt all the lost personalization/configuration from notes, etc.

I found this hint on macosxhints.com. The hint did not apply to Photoshop but more generally directed to preference-related problems that could not be resolved by removing/replacing the application's preference files.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031126123806922