Tuesday, 21th August 2007Solution to Adobe Photoshop CS3 Crashes on Startup or Load

Photoshop CS3 Crashes when Loading, Starting or Initialising

Many users of Adobe's CS3 Suite are encountering errors and problems with Photoshop and Illustrator, often on start up and sometimes on saving.

For example many receive a windows error such as, "An unhandled win32 exception occurred in Photoshop.exe" or " An unhandled win32 exception occured in Illustrator.exe".

Photoshop and/or Illustrator Startup Problems

The key fixes I've found for the photoshop illustrator problem are:
1) Uninstall any fonts apart from the basic Windows fonts, if this solves the problem, gradually reinstall them until you find the problem font file (some users have reported a problem with a specific font "Matricula Espanola" (matricula_espanola)

2) Delete your preferences files for Photoshop - see here for more details: www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.ef4a07f

3) Change your default printer to one that will always be "Ready", I recommend the Adobe PDF printer and under Administrative Tools > Services, make sure the Printer Spooler Service is running and set to Automatic.

Illustrator Crashes When I try and Save

1) Change your default printer to one that will always be "Ready", I recommend the Adobe PDF printer and under Administrative Tools > Services, make sure the Printer Spooler Service is running and set to Automatic.

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Article Comments

  • 3

    Sue, 01:05
    03 February 2008

    Thanks. Great fix. I was experiencing the "an unhandled win 32 exception occured in illustrator.exe" and not able to save a file. Chaning the default printer to PDF solved the problem.

  • 2

    Billy, 09:50
    22 January 2008

    Thanks. My Illustrator was doing this. I tried reinstalling it once and that worked but then it started up again. The default printer seemed to really be the cause of the saving problem.

  • 1

    George, 15:21
    02 November 2007

    Absolutely fantastic article. It helps a lot cause I was looking for a solution in complex docs but it was so easy.