Expert: Amy - 1/13/2004

Question
A friend of mine is having trouble when opening her version of illustrator. I believe it is V9 running on a G4. Was working yesterday, every time she goes to open it it gets as far as the illustrator credits then crashes. She has tried opening it using the apple menu, application icon and even double clicking on a illustrator file. all to no avail. Something has gone somewhere. Any ideas?

Just want it to open for a start!

Answer
First, make sure that if it's 9, you're running all the 9 patches. I believe you should be running 9.0.2 Downloads are found at adobe.com here: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=27&platform=Macintosh

Then, my first thought is a bad AIprefs file.
Quit Illustrator.  Do a search for AIPrefs and delete it, then relaunch Illustrator.

My next thought would be a bad font list. A common problem.
Quit Illustrator. Do a search on your machine and delete all instances of adobefnt.lst, then launch Illustrator again.

If neither of these works, I'd try reinstalling the application.

If that doesn't work, you can start trying to find extension conflicts by turning off all your extensions, especially any font management extensions/control panels, like the known culprit Action WYSIWYG 1.0.2 which makes font names appear in their own font within applications' font menus.

Also, turn off your Virtual Memory and see if that has any effect.

This will give you a good start.  If nothing here works, get back to me!

-Amy