I’ve been having this problem as well. As I continue to experiment (and finding out that "read the faq" and "delete preferences" aren’t the solutions), I am pinpointing more and more of the issue. At least for me.
Photoshop 7 (then 7.1) doesn’t seem to have any difficulty opening .bmp, .jpg, .png, or .gif (although I need to test more .gifs). However, it does seem to black-screen consistently when loading–get this–.psd files.
At first I thought it was only BIG files. I have a project that I’m supposed to work on that has a source file of about 35meg. Huge. It crashed all the time trying to open that. Then I started trying to open other .psd files and found that sometimes it would just crash when opening a small file. So the file size doesn’t really seem to be the issue.
What I’ve seen is that once I click OPEN the status bar does the "Reading Photoshop File Attributes" (or whatever it says down there…the black bar begins to fill up)…then at some random point in that process, it crashes. Most recently, I opened a 2,453kb file just fine, then opened a 353kb file and black-screened.
what’s a "black screen"? is your entire computer freezing? rebooting? what operating system?
and see this fact if you are locking up completely. if it’s win xp or 2k you likely have a hardware problem.
Mathias Vejerslev "Computer locks up, shuts down, or reboots while running Photoshop" 6/5/03 3:49pm </cgi-bin/webx?13/1>
