Kirk,
You don’t say which PS version you’re running, but apparently it isn’t PS CS or else a system restore itself would corrupt your activation state. So, for CS2 or CS3, all I can think of is that Registry First Aid is deleting registry keys that definte part of your serialization data. The absence of that data would likely corrupt your activation state. If you can set up exclusions to tell Registry First Aid what registry keys to avoid, then I’d put the folowing (inclusive of subkeys) into the exclusions list:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe
Likewise, launch REGEDIT, browse to the following key and search for "Photoshop", noting each major key under which it is found, and add each key to the list of exclusions: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion \Uninstall
If you only have one version of PS installed, I think that last step should only reveal one key to be cocerned with.
Hope that helps,
Daryl
Anyone who uses any kind of registry cleaner is just looking for trouble, as you have found out.
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Steve
Daryl,
Agreed.
However,most people do not use caution.
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Steve
Steve,
I know what you’re saying but suggest that isn’t the case…not if one uses a registry cleaner carefully, paying attention to review all items found and selectively deselecting those which should be left as is. Any tool that works automatically with little feedback to the user however, is indeed one that should not be used. CCleaner ("Crap Cleaner", www.ccleaner.com) is a useful cleaner to have at one’s disposal if used with caution.
Regards,
Daryl
Well, I obviously didn’t use it with enough caution. I ran two different Registry Cleaners in a row, both of them finding different things amiss.
I backed up to a restore point that I had set. (well maybe some caution was involved) It worked then.
I ran only Registry First Aid again and it seemed to have done a better job this time. Didn’t mess up Photoshop this time.
Kirk
Kirk,
Glad to hear you’re cruising along now. Yes, it can be a bit aggressive sometimes to run multiple registry cleaners unless, again, you just proceed very cautiously. Some are so poorly designed that caution isn’t built into them. I used to use Norton WinDoctor a lot, and it worked well if you were careful. Some of its solutions were nothing better than fixing a bad path by pointing it to file totally unrelated, but named the same, as a file it found missing. That’s just one example. Nowadays, I may use CCleaner a little but more often I just do my own cleaning and only of the most obvious stuff I find left behind.
Regards,
Daryl
I ran Registry Mechanic but it discovered so many errors and invalid entries that I would have to check, that I decided to leave things alone!