OS X hang - Adobe Photoshop Elements

[Eric]

I just upgraded from Photoshop LE (Mac system 9) to Elements 2.0 (OS X). Every so often it hangs the entire machine -- frozen mouse, everything -- and I have to do a hard restart. I know the whole idea of OS X was that this sort of thing was supposed to *never* happen, but there it is. I am running OS 10.2.8, but I got the same thing under 10.2.6 (in fact I updated to 10.2.8 in hopes this problem might go away).

I never had this problem with PS LE, nor do I have it with any other application. I haven't been able to correlate it with any particular activity or tool in PS, nor with anything else going on on the machine. Anybody ever see this, or have an idea what to do about it? Thanks for any ideas.

- Eric

[Beth]

I haven't seen or heard of this specifically, Eric, but I am going to ask the standard question: Have you repaired permissions? Particularly after installing software and upgrades? Many people have and forget to mention it, but others don't do that routinely and wind up with problems. We might as well address this issue first!

[Barbara]

Also, Eric when exactly do these fteezes happen? What are you doing at the time? Some details about your system would be nice, too.

[Tony]

Removed by Administrator

[Eric]

I've been repairing permissions pretty regularly, but I tried it again and, sure enough, it seems to always find something to fix. Since then I've been having no trouble, but I've often gone a few days without this happening. I'll check in here if it continues.

When it happens, it seems out of the blue; I'm moving the mouse across the image and suddenly everything freezes up. Since I'm learning my way around Elements, I'm trying out a lot of tools these days, but I can't correlate this to any particular tool.

My system is a G4, running 10.2.8 in its vanilla state with no system or finder-level additions or frills. I'm connected via DSL and Airport, though of course I'm not using those when this occurs.

[Barbara]

What vintage of G4 and how much ram do you have? Do you use macjanitor or tail if you don't keep your computer on and awake 24/7?

[Eric]

350 MHz PowerPC G4
384 MB RAM

I keep it on (though asleep) all the time, except that once a week I like to power it down and restart. No macjanitor or tail (don't know what those are).

[Barbara]

Ah. I don't think this will solve your problem completely, but you should be doing this anyway. X, being UNIX, has a bunch of housekeeping tasks it runs for itself in the wee hours of the AM, usually between 3 and 5 am. If your computer is asleep or shut down during that time, it can't perform them.

So if you let your computer sleep, you need to go to versiontracker or macupdate and download macjanitor, which lets you manually run these cron tasks whenever you like. It's qute easy to do and doesn't take long. There are daily, weekly and monthly tasks. It's not absolutely necessary to run it every day--lots of people run it every couple of weeks or so.

[Eric_Rawlins@adobeforums.com]

I think I may have found the problem, though I don't understand it. It appears that my Mac freezes up when I have Elements running and Eudora decides it's time to check my mail. Why this should cause a system freeze I don't know, or why anything Eudora does would impact Photoshop I don't know, but the guy at Adobe tech support told me that Photoshop is very sensitive to any kind of irregular system event, and Eudora may be doing something not quit kosher. I've turned off auto mail check in Eudora, and I'll see if the problem goes away now.

[Beth_Haney@adobeforums.com]

I quit using Eudora long ago because I was having these problems pre OS X. I'd been thinking about going back to it in Jaguar, but maybe I should reconsider that, huh?

[Barbara_Brundage@adobeforums.com]

I don't think it's much better than mail.app in jaguar, Beth, unless you need the features in the paid version.

[Eric_Rawlins@adobeforums.com]

I spoke too soon. I've just gotten the crash twice more, when Eudora wasn't even launched. I think there must be something flaky in my system, though the disk utility shows no problems. Back to square one.....

[Beth_Haney@adobeforums.com]

Barbara, how do you get mail to show just the subject and sender? I don't want to a mail program that won't let me do that without also displaying the content of the message. So far I haven't figured out how to keep mail from displaying the content. I can do it very nicely in my old Net Comm 4.7, which is why I'm still using it for almost all of my e-mail, even though it means staying in OS 9. I tried the free version of Eudora but couldn't stand it.

[Barbara_Brundage@adobeforums.com]

Oh, that's easy once you know the trick, Beth. Just grab the little lines on the middle of the divider bar between the address section and the preview window and drag it all the way down. Voila, no more preview.

[Beth_Haney@adobeforums.com]

You're right; you sure need to know that trick, because I could have sat there for a month before I found that one! :) Thanks, Barbara. Maybe I'll like mail better now.