April 21, 2006 7:49 AM PDT

Mac OS X 10.4.6 Special Report: Third-party applications: Fix for Photoshop save on crash; Word crashes; more

by CNET staff

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Photoshop CS2 -- crashes on save Several readers have reported an issue where Photoshop CS2 crashes promptly after saving to remote volumes after under Mac OS X 10.4.6.

MacFixIt reader Matt Sarah writes:

"We have performed system updates on 3 G5s to Mac OS 10.4.6. Both machines are running Photoshop CS2 and both copies crash when saving (oddly, the file will successfully save when it crashes). We have tested the same files in CS2 on machines that have not been updated and they do not crash. There is definitely an issue with Mac OS 10.4.6 and Photoshop CS2.

Another reader writes:

"My Photoshop users were ready to riot. We use Windows 2003 Server with ExtremeZ-IP for file sharing. After the update my PS users would open a file off of the server, do their retouch and save the file back to the server. Once the save completes Photoshop quits. To make matters worse the Crash Reporter also quits so I can't find out exactly what crashed. For some users Photoshop crashes after each save, for others it crashes one out of three saves."

Meanwhile, the head of technical support for ExtremeZ-IP (File Server software adds Macintosh file sharing [AppleShare] to Windows file servers) tells MacFixIt that this Photoshop crash problem appears to happen with all AFP (Apple Filesharing protocol) servers tested.

Geordie Korper writes:

"We have filed a bug report with both Apple and Adobe asking that this be resolved soon. The details of how to reproduce the problem are below:

"The Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Version 9.0) crash occurs only when using Mac OS X 10.4.6 when saving to an AFP server such as Mac OS X Server, Microsoft Services for Macintosh (SFM) or ExtremeZ-IP. The problem doesn?t occur locally or on previous OS versions saving to these same servers.

Steps to reproduce this problem:

Connect to Server using afp://server name.

Open a Photoshop file.

Make a change.

Click save.

"Result: Photoshop crashes with an error message saying that the application ended unexpectedly."

Fixes

Replace AppleShare files MacFixIt reader Bryan Schappel found a fix for this issue, which involves replacing the AppleShare components included in Mac OS X 10.4.6 with copies from Mac OS X 10.4.5.

To obtain these files, either copy them (locations are listed below) from a working Mac OS X 10.4.5 system, or use software like Pacifist to extract them from the Mac OS X 10.4.5 combo updater, available from Apple's download page.

Bryan writes:

"I spent several hours this morning trying to find out what was crashing and finding a fix. Here's what works so far:

"I downgraded the AppleShare client software on the Macs to the version that shipped in 10.4.5. I replaced these three folders with the older ones:

/System/Library/Filesystems/AppleShare

/System/Library/Frameworks/AppleShareClientCore.framework

/System/Library/Frameworks/AppleshareClient.framework

"After repairing permissions and restarting Photoshop no longer crashes."

Delete preferences MacFixIt reader Ed Mease presents another solution -- deleting Adobe Photoshop's preferences by holding down the Command, Option and Shift keys while the application is launching.

"I talked to Adobe Support about this issue. The person I talked with had me quit photoshop and then holding down the command, option and shift keys launch the application (photoshop). This brings up a dialog box click on yes this will delete the old plist file in the preferences folder. This did the trick for me, problem is gone."

Microsoft Word 2004 issues Some users have reported problems with Word 2004 crashing repeatedly after the update to Mac OS X 10.4.6.

MacFixIt reader Carsten writes:

"After having installed the 10.4.6 update Word (current version) crashes upon opening certain documents. Others open fine. I've been working on the documents that don't open anymore yesterday and they worked fine. They also work on an other Mac with 10.4.5 installed."

Some users of the German edition have found that the file "German Hyphenation" is causing the problem.

One solution to this issue is to remove "German Hyphenation" from Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Gemeinsame Anwendungen/Korrekturhilfen.

MacFixIt reader Guenter Schwiebert reports that replacing this file with a copy from Microsoft Office v.X allows hyphenation to work correctly without the crash.

Guenter writes:

"If you remove the 3 files

German Hyph Dict (post-reform)

German Hyph Dict (pre-reform)

German Hyphenation

"Word 2004 will not crash if you try to open a file which includes automatic hyphenation, but certainly the hyphenation will not work yet. But you can put the same files from the previous version Office v.X. Then Word 2004 will work with hyphenation without any crashes."

Adobe Acrobat will not launch Some users report problems launching Adobe Acrobat 7.0.7 after the update to Mac OS X 10.4.6.

One reader writes:

"Mac OS X 10.4.6 for my Intel-based Mac killed Acrobat 7.0.7. Distiller works but Acrobat crashes at launch. So far I have trashed .plist -files and deleted application caches. Those moves did not help."

MacFixIt reader Brett DeCarion reports a solution that involves deleting the following files then restarting:

"Acrobat User Data" from ~/Library/

"Adobe" from ~/Library/Application Support/

"AdobeUM" from ~/Library/Preferences/

"com.adobe.acrobat.sh.plist" from ~/Library/Preferences/

"com.adobe.Reader7.0.plist" from ~/Library/Preferences/

InDesign issues MacFixIt reader Joel Mason reports problems viewing images in InDesign after the update:

"I updated my work computer to 10.4.6 and now in InDesign 3.0.3 I can open a document but type and graphic files are not visible. Also, all guides are invisible as well. I can open a new document and type in fresh text that is visible but will go away if any changes to the document format is made. I hope Adobe or Apple is working on something to fix this. I have several documents that are at deadline - luckily I have a firewire drive attached with 10.4.5 and have been able to use InDesign on it"

QuarkXpress Some users are reporting issues with QuarkXpress 6.5 after the Mac OS X 10.4.6 update.

MacFixIt reader Thomas writes:

"Some of our users cannot print with QuarkXpress 6.5 anymore. Other users cannot use the 'Usage' function in quark to re-link images anymore. In both cases Quark X-Press unexpectedly quits."

MacFixIt reader Lawrence reports that in his case, an errant Quark Xtenstion was the problem, and removing it allowed printing.

Lawrence writes:

"Once we upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4.6 we could no longer print from Quark (Quark simply quit each time). We found that the 'Blend Fixer 6 XT.xnt' was the cause, this is as a Postscript blend fixer supplied by Xinet. Xinet is aware of the problem."

Photoshop Elements 3 -- menu items grayed out Some users have reported an issue where various menu items, including the Open and Quit selections from the "File" menu are grayed out and cannot be selected.

In many cases, this issue can be resolved by deleting the following file:

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Photoshop.Elements.plist