PC CS stalls upon opening, even with CTRL-SHIFT-ALT fix

My CS was running fine until Saturday night when it locked up. We had to do a hard reboot to get out of it as no other fixes would work. We did a backup of our system that night, just in case.

Upon trying to open CS the next morning, it stalls at the point of the opening text box goes to 'done' and the tool bar beginning to show. It just stops, and hangs, never to open. We have done these things:

Uninstalled and reinstalled.
Uninstalled and run a registry clean then reinstalled.
Reloaded our system to days before the crash.

My printer is local. The fix in the FAQ does not work. We've cleaned out every possible bit of info from the registry we could find, as well as cleaning out my system of PS product before rebooting and reloading.

I can open Illustrator and Acrobat. It's just PSCS that hangs on opening.

Here are my specs:
Athlon XP 2200
1 GB PC2100 DDR Ram
64 meg 4xAGP video
250 Gigs HDD space (with equal backup space)
Running Windows XP Service Pack 2

and, again, this was working fine for months until the hang-up Saturday evening.

I appreciate your help

Darcy,

The problem is probably a not successfully deleted preferences file. This is not removed with an unistall/reinstall cycle.

It's a Photoshop preferences.psp -file.

Exactly where in the startup sequence does it stall? (it can't say "done" because it isn't, unless the computer is extremely hot! :-) ) .

Rob

LOL, Rob! :)

The opening screen, as it goes through loading brushes and fonts, etc. etc. That screen ends saying it's done..and is just about to disappear. The tools bar (for lack of a better word to identify it) on the left side of the screen) Just starts to appear when it all freezes.


I'm pretty sure that image won't work, but I did a screen shot of it to show in case I needed it LOL Here's the URL

< http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v201/aslansavz/AdobePSCSTE ST.jpg>

I will go back and look, once again, for the .psp file to try to delete it to see if that works.

FYI - update
I went in and deleted ALL the preferences..not just the PS pref, but those for brushes, etc. I also did the ctrl-shift-alt this time when starting and it worked.

Thanks for your help - hopefully this will help someone else down the line.