Lost Settings in PSCS

I just opened CS after closing it normally yesterday, only to find that it had completely lost its settings and reverted to the freshly installed state. I've occasionally had the problem in PS7, but this is the first time in CS...I was hoping this problem had been solved. To make this even more strange, my actions were still there, but an additional copy of them had been appended to the end. It generally only takes me about 10 minutes to get PS back to a workable state, but that's 10 minutes I could have been working on something productive.

Photoshop's preferences file seems to be the root of most of its evils (with the notable exceptions of currency content scanning and activation, which are evil beyond comprehension). About half the posts in here contain the phrase "trash prefs". I wish Adobe would come up with a better way to handle prefs...it's obviously fragile and prone to error.

Yes, prefs have to be coddled. :-)

Since moving to Photoshop CS my preferences keep disappearing, announcing their demise with warnings about scratch disks and colour management. I keep a copy of the whole folder on another drive now and copy it back to the right place when it happens. But WHY does it happen? It never happened with PS 3.0 onwards. Until now! The actions don't go cos they're in a different folder.

This new version is a real beauty but we certainly need a version 8.01 soon!