Corrupted Help Files

Greetings,

I am running Elements 4.0 on Windows XP and am new to digital photo editing software, but not photography itself. . When I originally installed the software the entire program functioned fine with no problems. For no reason that I know of, all of my help files became corrupted and will not execute, this is a bad situation for me as a novice as I rely on them heavily. I have searched the internet for countless hours looking for a way to resolve this problem with no luck. I would be very grateful if anyone can help or direct me to a source for the solution.

I am more than willing to remove and reinstall the program but am concerned about the integrity and retaining of my many photos; well in excess of a couple thousand. Please let me know if this can be safely done as a solution to the problem and I will do this right away. Any and all advice is welcome!

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

Tony Norton

Removing Elements 4 and re-installing it should not cause you to loose your photos.

If you have that many photos on your hard drive you should be archiving them on CDs or DVDs anyway, as hard drive failures are likely to destroy them, if not today, inevitably sometime in the future. Don't ever keep valuable copies of photos on your hard drives more than a few days without making backups of them. Think about it. Do you leave your negatives around where they can easily be damaged? Professional photographers spend considerable amounts of money to provide safe storage for their negatives. Backups of digital photos should receive the same treatment.

--
Charley

wrote in message

Greetings,

I am running Elements 4.0 on Windows XP and am new to digital photo

editing

software, but not photography itself. . When I originally installed the software the entire program functioned fine with no problems. For no

reason

that I know of, all of my help files became corrupted and will not

execute,

this is a bad situation for me as a novice as I rely on them heavily. I have searched the internet for countless hours looking for a way to

resolve

this problem with no luck. I would be very grateful if anyone can help or direct me to a source for the solution.

I am more than willing to remove and reinstall the program but am

concerned

about the integrity and retaining of my many photos; well in excess of a couple thousand. Please let me know if this can be safely done as a solution to the problem and I will do this right away. Any and all advice is welcome!

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

Tony Norton

There should be no reason that you can not reinstall the program. I think there may also be a "repair" choice when you insert the cd. This would make sure that you do not lose any PE4 specific files such as things created by the Organizer. I don't use the organizer so I am not sure what files it may generate. But if that doesn't work then I would do a uninstall and then install.
As for your photos, they should remain unaffected. However, that being said, for more reasons than this, you should be backing them up. I use an external USB/IEEE1394 hard drive and do weekly backups with incremental backups every time I do any extensive work.
Hard drives are cheap insurance these days.
And for real archiving, I use an external dvd burner.

wrote:

Greetings,

I am running Elements 4.0 on Windows XP and am new to digital photo editing software, but not photography itself. . When I originally installed the software the entire program functioned fine with no problems. For no reason that I know of, all of my help files became corrupted and will not execute, this is a bad situation for me as a novice as I rely on them heavily. I have searched the internet for countless hours looking for a way to resolve this problem with no luck. I would be very grateful if anyone can help or direct me to a source for the solution.

I am more than willing to remove and reinstall the program but am concerned about the integrity and retaining of my many photos; well in excess of a couple thousand. Please let me know if this can be safely done as a solution to the problem and I will do this right away. Any and all advice is welcome!

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

Tony Norton

wrote:

Greetings,

I am running Elements 4.0 on Windows XP and am new to digital photo editing software, but not photography itself. . When I originally installed the software the entire program functioned fine with no problems. For no reason that I know of, all of my help files became corrupted and will not execute,

What happens when you click on "Photoshop Elements Help" ? On the left, does it say "Product help for:
Adobe Help Center 2" ?
If so, that must be changed to "Elements 4.0"

Luk