Expert: LizaL - 3/16/2005

Question
Hi Lisa,
I checked out your web sites. They are excellent! You do outstanding work.
I tried all of your suggestions, and nothing worked.
To answer your 4 questions I will give you some history.
I started working on the G5 in Jan of 2004. It was new as was all of the software. I was newly hired to set up and run a computer to plate department at a small printing company. The PhotoShop was flaky from the get-go. All of the other apps in Creative Suite are fine. The only other thing that sometimes happen is the cursor will take on the "noise" outside of PhotoShop occasionally. I did a screen capture of what it (PhotoShop palettes) looks like and I would like to send it to you. What email address can I sent it to?-------------------------
Followup To
Question -
I am running Creative Suite on a G5 Mac. It is running Panther OSX. (10.3.8)
For some reason all of the palettes in PhotoShop are covered with what I call "noise". They have a fuzziness to them that you can't tell what they are.
When you run your cursor over them, they clear up, but don't stay clear.
I talked to Apple about it and they said it was a 3rd party software issue.
I have re-loaded the apps but that didn't help.
Any suggestions?

Ken
Answer -
Hi Ken,

I have to agree with Apple on this. It does sound like a third-party issue, but just who the third party is, is the question. In other words, it's not necessarily Photoshop causing this.

Other than that, I can't offer any ideas as to what the problem is. I've never heard of it, and I've been searching for quite a while this morning online, looking for clues as to the cause, but can't find anything.

So I'll offer up what I'd do if this were happening to me:

1. Run Disk Utility, but boot up from your OS X CD and run it that way, so you can check and repair the drive and/or partition you boot your machine from.

2. Repair permissions at the same time that you run Disk Utility, also after you boot up from your OS X CD.

3. Do you regularly do maintenance on your Mac? If not, you might want to check out MacJanitor. This free download will run all the maintenance routines that are normally, and automatically, run when you're using OS X.

If you sleep your machine at night, or turn it off, many necessary Unix routines won't be able to perform, so MacJanitor will do it for you. You can find MacJanitor here:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/10491

4. Try rebooting and running Photoshop again. If it still has the fuzzy palettes, try one more maintenance routine: fsck.

Basically, fsck ("file system check") is a tool for checking the consistency of a Unix file system.

Here are the steps for manually running fsck, straight from the horse's mouth (the Apple site):
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

This is basically page for troubleshooting a Mac that won't start, but nonetheless, it has the fsck instructions on it, too.

5. Now if none of this helps, I'd suggest trashing your Photoshop prefs. Go to (user)>Library>Preferences, and trash this one: com.adobe.Photoshop.plist.


And if none of this works, my suggestion is to review the last few things you've done, as far as installations, on your Mac. Answer these questions and post them back to me, if none of the things above work, and we'll go from there to solve this mystery!


1. Have you installed any other new software, prior to this problem?

2. Have you installed any new hardware (especially requiring drivers) prior to the problem?

3. Does it happen with any other application open, or is it only when you have Photoshop running?

4. How do the other applications in the Creative Suite work? Do you see any signs of trouble with those?


Also, please post back if there are any procedures I've mentioned here that you'd like help with.

This is admittedly bizarre, but there's got to be an explanation!


Lisa

Answer
Well, thanks, Ken! I haven't updated my Web site in forever, and have more content to add -- so this is nice to hear.

Now about your Mac problem -- you know, when you mentioned the cursor looking fuzzy, it occurred to me that I've seen *that* before. I've never seen whole palettes look like that, but I've definitely seen cursors do that, and it's usually been a software conflict . . . but that was back in the OS 9 days, though. And since you say the software was all new, that makes me think of one other thing: You could have a bum installation CD (or CDs) for your Creative Suite.

If you have access to another (hopefully similar) machine, you might try installing Creative Suite there, and seeing if you have the problem there. If you do, I'd say it's a bum disc. If not, then it almost has to be a software conflict. But yikes, the trial and error process to figure this out is long and tiresome.

Well, in the meantime, I'll be happy to take a look at your screen shot. Send it to lizal@little-works.com. And let's hope it's NOT a conflict!

Lisa

P.S. Sounds like a good job you got! I was so glad to see printing heading in that direction (computer to plate).