CS2 hangs during cropping - makes HUGE temp file on scratch disk

Photoshop CS2 hangs when doing a crop on even a tiny file with no layers in it. The crop tool builds a HUGE (32GB!) file on the scratch disk and CS2 hangs.

I began having troubles yesterday, first with Firefox and Adobe Acrobat - they would hang when opening a PDF file. Adobe Reader 7 and Firefox were uninstalled and reinstalled numerous times, many settings were changed, etc. It is still not working correctly.

Today, I tried to use CS2 and have this hang in the cropping tool. Being a professional photographer, I am getting a bit frantic.

I have a 3.0 GHz Intel CPU, 2GB of RAM, 320GB of RAID-0 main drive, and a scratch disk with 50GB free. I have upped the page file size, reinstalled CS2, uninstalled all other versions of Photoshop and Adobe Reader, growled and whined, all to no avail.

Ideas?

Thanks!

Deleting the preferences file fixed the problem.

It seems completely strange to me, but that fixed it.

It seems completely strange to me, but that fixed it

A corrupt Prefs file can cause all sorts of unexplained problems - and, of course, it doesn't automatically get replaced during a reinstall!

and deleting the prefs reset the fixed size target that you had entered for the crop tool...