Photoshop 7 won't open anymore

I am a web designer and rely heavily on Photoshop 7 which all of a sudden won't open. . . all fonts load fine, plug-ins, etc. but it craps out in the initialization phase. . . . in other words the program disappears. (Win 2000 Pro, Pentium III, double 800 MHz processors, 768 MB Ram.) I multi task between Dreamweaver, Photoshop, word and sometimes fireworks and when things get slow, I reboot. A few days ago I put some new Photoshop 7 complaint plug-ins and tested the machine with each one or small group with no problem. Everything worked fine for a few days. . .

Then once it took a really long time for the program to open and the next day this occurred. I have removed Photoshop, moved the plug-ins and extras to another folder out of the way, rebooted and then reinstalled Photoshop to no avail.

Do I need to remove registry entries and other files? and if so can anyone direct me to instructions so I can get a clean install.

In the meantime I have installed Photoshop on my server machine and am working there and sending images across the network. . . a real drag. Issues like this scare me because short of getting a new computer, I am not sure what to do.

Thanks for any help and ideas you have.

jidarius

If I have these sorts of problems on my Mac, I generally trash the preferences file for the offending application, which fixes the problem 9.5 times out of 10.

Is there a way of doing something similar in Windows?

I went to another site and found the answer (sort of) and winged it. I went to documents and settings>application data>adobe>photoshop>7.0 and zapped the folder "adobe photoshop 7 settings". . . Then I reinstalled the program and voila, everything is fine.

It is recommended to keep a backup of these folders somewhere whenever you make changes and things are working. . . sometimes the preferences file gets corrupted and needs to be deleted.

This works for other programs as well.

Another thing. As you have learned ask for help when you need it. . . it is generally forthcoming pretty quickly. . . especially if you stay calm and trust that if you can formulate a good question.

This really saved me.

A good tip on XP is to create another user account with admin rights, you'll find there's a good chance your "backdoor" account will still work.....