Illustrator CS (11) crashes ALL THE TIME!

[George_Ferris@adobeforums.com]

I've been looking at previous threads on this board and none seem to resolve the continual crashing I've experienced with this latest version of Illustrator. It just disappears while saving and printing, and no deletion of preferences or repair of disk permissions changes that fact. I'm ready to reinstall version 10 except for all the work it'll take saving all these version 11 documents back to version 10. Would somebody shoot me now?!

[Joshua_Bierman@adobeforums.com]

there are a number of such posts, take a look... most of the time people are suggesting things like check your fonts and change your timezone and then change it back... a whole host of items appear to help diffarent poeple..... look around

[George_Ferris@adobeforums.com]

I've taken a look at these posts and none seems to address just random crashing. I've checked all fonts and that timezone switch and it's still crashing. Is there any news that Adobe is planning a patch?

[Teri Pettit]

George,

There must be something about your system that is causing the random crashing. Illustrator CS doesn't crash for most people. I know that doesn't help your situation, but Adobe can't make a patch unless there is a problem that they can reproduce.

Have you made sure that you aren't using Norton Utilities?

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

Also have you trashed your AI CS preferences and I mean when you try each fix you have yo once again trash the preferences, you change the time zone you trash the preferences and restart AI CS you check your fonts you trash the preferences you made sure you have other software that interacts with AI CS, you are sure and of course you removed all plug ins and all the haxies and you tried to create a new user account and log in to that account and launch AI CS?

You are also sure you have not used any utility or software to move the application or other systems components?

[Scott_Weichert@adobeforums.com]

George,

Are you using a great deal of transparency?

I ask because I'm experiencing the odd crash from time to time and I'm trying to nail it down. So far I think it's got something to do with transparency and multiple layers, but I'm not certain.

[Alexander_R_Lee@adobeforums.com]

Come on!

This is a joke - we're meant to trash preferences everytime we use Illustrator CS? Is this lame shareware or software we pay 100s and 100s of dollars for?

I've been using the Adobe CS suite for weeks now and I can't express my disappointment enough. Photoshop is slower than it already was in version 7. Illustrator CS seems mostly faster, with screen draws in particular, although it's a lot slower to save files (when Adobe's propaganda said it would be faster in CS). But Illustrator crashes most times I export an .EPS and I manually have to reselect a linked photoshop file for the image to refresh in Illustrator.

This is poor. Adobe needs to turn around their Mac support. Or is this the idea? Alienate the Mac community to the point where we don't want new versions and hey presto Adobe only needs to develop for one platform.

Please, someone from Adobe please tell me there is a bug fix for everything SOON.

[Christopher_Gentry@adobeforums.com]

Scott,

I don't think that it has anything to do with transparency. I just finished a set of illustrations for mini cooper that had a TON (maybe two) of transparency in the documents. I would have to say that CS ran pretty well but it seems a little crash happy. I have an odd issue where when I click on the rectangle tool to select the ellipse tool it will pause for a little longer than usual and bam illustrator is gone.

The save times are pathetic. I posted a topic on that and not one person commented and I am a little suprised by that. It litterally takes 6-7 times longer for me to save in this version than it did in illustrator 10 unless I have a very simple document. Lame.

I am not seeing the huge speed difference that others are seeing either. It is very quick in outline mode but I don't work that way. I had really good fortune with illlustrator 10 unlike others. I found it to be pretty decent except for that damn gray box and the grandient slider bug that adobe could never reproduce that magically disappeared in CS.

I think the crashing may be apples doing. Other people are reporting frequent crashing in other programs that aren't necessarily graphics apps. Alot of the issues have been resolved in 10.3.3 according to rumors. Lets hope that the crashy crash world of illustrator CS is one of them.

Adobe is going to have to make some outstanding products in the future to get any more money out of me. I am sick of paying for updates that aren't any more polished than their predecessors.

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

If you do a search there are issues that can be resolved and you may have to learn or apply skills of trouble shooting to find them out.

Good luck.

[S_Cavanaugh@adobeforums.com]

Wade, I've tried all the solutions here I could find, and so far none have worked. I seem to be spending more time trashing preferences, changing timezones, checking fonts, repairing permissions, deleting caches, examining crashlogs, etc., etc. than I do actually getting any work done in AI 11!

And because it crashes so frequently, I find myself having to Cmd-S all the time, but this is a problem too because it can take up to a minute to save a simple document (even after the sloooooow progress bar goes away, I get the spinning rainbow cursor for what seems like forever, and of course, during that period, I can't do anything else but stare at my monitor and try to keep my BP under control).

And god forbid my design requires text! I currently have to do all of my text entry in Text Edit, then paste it into AI CS because CS slows to an *absolute crawl* when entering text (I'm talking like a 5 second delay between keyboard input and seeing it on screen in AI).

By that point, I think to myself, "This is rediculous. I'm not getting any work done," so I export the file as an AI 10 document, but when I open it in AI 10, I discover that CS has segmented a single text block into several (i.e., 50) separate chunks, sometimes breaking single words into multiple objects. What?!

(BTW, no Norton Utilities, no NAV, no Spell Catcher, no haxies, just a very basic Panther installation on a G4 with a GB of RAM, and... all my fonts are either Apple's System fonts or Adobe T1/OTF fonts -- verified as problem-free.)

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

Did you try to create a new user account and log into that user account and see if you have the same problems. You shouldn't you know and if you still have these problems I would say that you that AI CS is telling you you have a hardware problem and yes that can at first manifest itself within one particular application the first thing that comes to mind is and i know this will hurt, your graphic card.

I started noticing recently that I was having problems with some applications, not AI though and was never able to figure it out until my second monitor really started to loose it's geometry and make noises. The solution to my problems was simple the monitor had to go and now i have to decide on another CRT or a LCD.

Not something I want to do right now but you get my point.

Oh, yes this has been discussed and on three occasions this has proven to be the problem.

[S_Cavanaugh@adobeforums.com]

I've got a 23" Apple Cinema HD monitor with a Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card. Both are just a couple of months old, latest ATI driver (Nov. 03), etc. This is pretty vanilla stuff.

I thought maybe my Apple memory was bad, but after some lengthy diagnostics, everything checks out fine....

I haven't tried creating a new user account, however. I guess I'll give that a shot, but man, using software shouldn't be this difficult.

[Scott_Weichert@adobeforums.com]

Wow.

Well, I've not seen anything like what's being described here. I get the occassional crash on a very, very complicated document with heavy use of transparency. And that crash is really rare and only after hours of use (like a few days with the machine and application running).

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

Maybe the PDF has a memory leak on some dual G4's or an incompatibility with that video card or it's drivers.

[S_Cavanaugh@adobeforums.com]

The Radeon 9800 Pro card is not the problem. The drivers are standard, installed not by ATI but by Panther. And, uh, I know what a haxie is and would know if any were installed on my system. There are none. So if "experience tells you differently," well, then it would seem your experience is about as reliable as Illustrator CS.

I did, however, identify some startup items -- .VirexLogin, installed as part of the Virex application available to .Mac subscribers, and a button manager for a Canon scanner. Both were removed, but alas, it made no difference. CS still takes an interminable amount of time to save and text entry is so slow as to make it virtually unusable. (Pasting from Text Edit, however, works fine -- just can't edit or type new text.) I haven't crashed yet this morning, but experience tells me it will.

And font corruption is not the problem either. I'm running a bare minimum of Apple system fonts and a handful of Adobe OTF fonts, and all have been verified by two different utilities as corruption free.

I've done the "magic" Time Zone change several times, followed by trashing the CS preferences folder and restarting. It doesn't make the *slightest bit* of difference.

So... if it is still something unique to my system, then Adobe Illustrator CS wins the Princess And The Pea award for being the most sensitive and delicate application ever developed for OS X, because nothing else crashes or behaves this way. Photoshop CS is fine. FontLab is fine. Etc., etc.

Wade, if you have solutions, I'd love to hear them. And I do appreciate your suggestions, but I don't appreciate constant apologizing for software, or telling people it must be their fault or that their troubleshooting skills aren't up to par. I didn't buy the Creative Suite to hone my troubleshooting skills. I also don't appreciate the time I've wasted chasing red herrings.

[Paul_Ukena@adobeforums.com]

regarding S Cavanaugh's problems:

As a Macintosh support specialist, I can attest to Illustrator's sensitivity. We had a client whose G4 ran absolutely every graphics application flawlessly, except for Illustrator. Replaced all RAM, reinstalled systems, upgraded, downgraded; we eventually swapped out the machine, and we use it as a server, happily chugging away as long as we don't use Illustrator. I hate to say it, but your problem is most likely a hardware problem, if switching to a new user doesn't help and you have the same problem even in a document only using Helvetica.

Sincerely,

Paul Ukena

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

It works here just fine! And for most people now there are bugs in AI CS but this has proven not to be one of them in every case it has proven to be something either the user did or some conflict with other software. You are convinced ti could not be anything on computer or something you did or did not do. In that OK I certainly don't think my thoughts then apply to you because those are the only things that I know to cause these problems.

I hope you find a solution to your problem!

[S_Cavanaugh@adobeforums.com]

>You are convinced it could not be anything on computer

No, I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced at all. I'd just like to know what it might be that apparently ONLY causes a problem with Illustrator CS... If it's a hardware problem, then surely it most affect other applications besides CS. This is a no-brainer.

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

It is not a no-brainer unfortunately this can happen for instance bad RAM can manifest itself only in Photoshop at first. A bad and failing Monitor can manifest itself
in Word before any other program is even effected.

This is my observation it is not intended a insult or derogatory in anyway, you are assuming to many things. That is what leads me to believe that you do have something on your system that is conflicting or is corrupt and is causing the problem.

You do have other software installed on your system somewhere there is where the problem probably lies. All you have to do to find out is create a new user account log into it and do nothing but work with AI do not add anything do not install anything
do not move anything. And you should be able to work. Now this is a for testing only user account so don't configure it anyway you are going delete it after you find that you can now work with AI CS.

Now that is as long as you have not used some software to move AI CS to another location like Net Info. That is all you have to do to find out if you have a corrupt user account.

Now you don't have to try this.

[Kirby_Spencer@adobeforums.com]

I too have a problem with AI CS crashing. My system is a G4/733 running 10.2.8. My system is very clean and for about two months AI CS ran just fine although it is a dog when saving documents. Several weeks ago it began to crash with no warning and it has gotten worse, crashing sometimes several times every day. I think Firefox is the only software I've installed in the last month or so. Everything else is very stable. I haven't had a chance to troubleshoot but I expect to start tomorrow.

I just wanted to say that this problem exists for other people too. Perhaps it's hardware but its AI CS that seems to have the problem.