There have been a few reports of problems with Help, but I don’t recall what theissues were and can’t find the postings.
A reinstall will not affect the catalog that you have built, so that is worth a try.
Resetting prefs is another option:
Go to C:\Documents and Settings\<your login>\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop Elements [replacing <your login> appropriately] and rename the folder "3.0" to "3.old".
Bob,
two things to try
1-Sometimes Help opens minimized and the active program bar in the task bar at the bottom of your screen for Help is a minimized program. Right click on it and see if you are able to click (left)on Restore to bring it back to a normal Window.
2-If that does not work, then try holding down Ctl-Alt-Shift when opening Help and hopefully you will see a box asking a question like Do you want to delete Help Preferences – respond OK or Yes (whichever you see). If you don’t see the box, try again; it was probably timing.
Barb O
Thanks for your help Barb. It worked slightly different- I selected Help from pull down, got the minimized box in active program bar, it would not open with a double click, the right click opened the small menu, the restore pick was gray, the maximize pick was live and that brought up the whole help system. WOW. Then I closed it and subsequent selection of help from pull down opened the whole help system right away. Another mysterious thing revealed. Thanks again. Bob Hegel
Bob
Glad that it is resolved. I noted that Maximize was successful for you for next time I post an answer to that question.
Barb O
Bob and Barb,
I’ve had the same problem with Help opening minimized and I think I’ve traced it to something I often do (but not any more in PE3).
I’ll open Help, read instructions and then minimize Help in case I have to go back to it. If I then exit PE3 with Help still minimized it seems to always open the next time minimized but unresponsive to anything but right click/maximize. Can’t be 100% sure that that is the cause but since I have been very careful to maximize and close Help separately I have not had the problem.
FWIW
Bob
This may be what happened, I don’t know.
When i try to get help i ultimately get an "initialization Error" message as follows: "cannot load the unicode compatibility layer [error: 126]"
Bernard,
If I knew the answer I’d post it here but I don’t. You may get a better response if you start a new thread with a topic of "cannot load the unicode compatibility layer [error: 126]".
Also, though it might be obvious to some from the error, you probably should include your platform and OS version.
Bob