reset your prefrences per the faq.
Hmmm. Well, thanks. I guess it did work; at least I’ve tried it a bunch of times and not had the problem. But tell me, does aberrant behavior happen often? I ask because having to go through all my preferences isn’t a fun thing and I could have lived without the variations.
I really think there should be a registry fix that would help individual actions such as this.
Also, I’d read the FAQ but of course there was no way of knowing a thread titled "How to delete/reset Photoshop preferences" would apply to this problem. I did a search of "variations" of the forum and found nothing. How would one know to do that? And what other badness would cause one to have to do this?
I’m actually asking this of the administrators, not you individually.
Anyway, thanks.
GM
How would one know to do that?
when things get wierd you reset the prefs. shouldn’t happen very often. if it does, consider a chkdsk with surface scan turned on.
Re; How would one know to do that?
You don’t. And Dave probably didn’t "know" it would cure your problem either. It is just that a power user with a great deal of experience knows that this solves many problems.
Re: Does aberrant behavior happen often?
Very seldom on my machine. Yours might cause problems more often. Some people have continual problems until they find which other program or driver is messing things up. Adobe provides a clean progran that works on a clean machine, but when users start adding peripherals or programs that don’t follow the MS conventions, problems can happen.
And putting the preferences into the registry would cause massive registry bloat, I suspect. There are countless things stored in this file.
Re: And what other badness would cause one to have to do this?
All kinds of problems can be cured by deleting the prefs. It is the first thing to try when your program messes up. It even catches things that persist through a reinstall.
Re: having to go through all my preferences isn’t a fun thing
It is possible to make a copy of your pref file when it is not sick, and then use this one to replace the one that breaks. A few things might change, like positions of palettes and their configuration (going back to a state you had set before you saved the copy preferences).
The trick is, the pref file gets dumped in different places on every version of windows, so we can’t easily tell you where it is. If you can find it then you can copy it. (Mention your OS, and someone might point you to the correct folder.)
Ah. Thanks, Don. I actually don’t think I’d changed any preferences (other than to write actions and they stayed put, thankfully) since I upgraded. At any rate, going back to a previous state is surely better than completely starting over, especially if one hasn’t made notes. Not that I’d admit that but… 😐
Anyway, I’m under Windows 2000 and if I know the file name, I’m likely to be able to find it. My guess is it might be "Adobe Photoshop CS Prefs.psp" in my "Documents and Settings/Administrator/Applications/Adobe/Photoshop/8.0 directory/Adobe Photoshop CS Settings" directory. There’s nothing in the workspaces directory but I’m thinking I should probably back up that whole settings directory which I just did, both in place and on my archives drive. If that’s not the right place and file, I hope you’ll let me know. 🙂
Thanks so much for the help.
GM
that’s right gorham. i’d do the whole folder. you should also try playing around with workspaces. very handy if you us ps for many different tasks or at a couple different screen resolutions.
Thanks, Dave. I’ll keep the workspace idea in mind but meanwhile I have what I think and hope is a stable preference folder and thanks you more than very much!! 🙂
GM
