Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 11/4/2008

Question
2 Questions

1.in the last 2 days I have received an error message while drawing in AI
"error ace did not initialize" ok

I click ok - and immediately save my drawing file. However once the saving file percentage bar comes to the end ( it's a large file about 80MB)it bombs me out and closes illustrator. Opening up AI again and then opening the file I find it's not saved it and I loose my work.
As I work to deadlines ( oil industry geological diagrams)this is worrying - I have to spend time re-drawing.
I don't really want to re-install in the middle of a project and would re-installing really cure it for the future.
I have a new Dell Precision 6300 laptop with 4GB ram and Nvidia 3600M graphic card with 512mb memory and AI has not long been installed.  I draw from scans and they need to be large jpgs to be able to get visual precision. Is it that I've found the limitation of AI CS2?
Question 2.
After this new installation of AI on my laptop I discovered that when I click on AI help - it comes up with Adobe Elements help!
I use this program for scanning but how on earth can you get this mixup? Can I correct it without re-installing as well

Answer
Hi Anne,

Not knowing if you are on Vista or not, I would say that you haven't maxed out CS2, but you may need to allocate more memory to it. The error you are getting is something new I haven't heard of and there is no record of an ace error. There are two things I have found referencing ace error - one is  your CS2 which uses an ace.dll file for updates. The second refers to user permissions and disk management, which is you are not in admin mode. This may explain why you can't write new files to the HD or initialize properly. Check your management permissions and then try running all updates after you have allocated more RAM to AI.

In regards to the help, when I go to my help there is a lot of different apps listed above (photoshop, illustrator, elements, etc. ) click on the illustrator name and it will take you there. if you do not have this option, then you may have had a bad install and may need to reinstall.

Thanks

Kevin