I have recently run into a maddening serious problem with Photoshop CS2. I've had it installed and running just fine for many months. I've received all the upgrade automatically. Before now, I've never had any trouble with it.

Suddenly, it started crashing 30 seconds after starting. This happened about the time I fixed a Windows XP Pro automatic update. I had one that didn't work right and had Microsoft help me clean it out and manually install it.

However, it could have been that trial version of Ewido anti-spyware software that I installed too. As with a lot of anti-spyware, it could have been causing some trouble. I have since uninstalled it, but that didn't help. These were the two changes I made before the crashing started.

The Windows message was not very specific, but implicated the file NTDLL.dll. Alas, my research shows that this is a dll used by a lot of things and doesn't say much for diagnosing the problem. The few people that have had this problem haven't seemed to find a solution. One guy did and somehow told Photoshop to stop making thumbnails, but that wasn't it for me.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Photoshop. I've tried several ways to make sure my XP Pro is up-to-date everywhere. I made sure the DLLs in the Photoshop folder were up-to-date with the ones in XP. Nothing helped. 30 seconds after the startup box goes away, Photoshop was doing something that crashed it.

I got to thinking that it might be checking for updates. Luckily Bridge has been working just fine throughout. I finally disabled the automatic upgrades in Bridge. That worked. Now Photoshop runs just fine.

Has anyone else had this problem? If so, what triggered it? What workarounds did you find?

Is there an actual fix for this problem? Exactly what is the problem; is it a bug in Adobe Update? If so, does Adobe know about it? How would I tell them? When are they going to fix it?

It doesn't appear to happen very often with users, but it can be totally crippling when it does happen. I doubt all users would spend the days I have trying to diagnose and workaround the problem.

Besides, I would like my automatic update working again.

Thanks,
Clyde

Clyde[1]

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CS2 Crashing on NTDLL.dll