happy new year! or it was :( I'm borrowing a friends machine while mines being fixed... I'm running PS6 which has been working perfectly for several days, then suddenly now when i open 'lighting effects' (everything else works fine), the dialogue window opens, but only the controls in the right half appear - not the preview window or anything on the left. This causes a crash - everything freezes - except the cursor - and i can't even ctrl/alt/del and have to shut down with the main off/on button. The owner re-installed PS last night, but it's still the same. He hasn't had any problems before (oops!) The only other thing i noticed was once (after the initial prob started) clicking on the zoom tool caused the same thing to happen - i haven't tried that again, just in case and the zoom tools work fine from the top menu bar. i've upped PS RAM from 50 to 64 and played around with graphics acceleration in control panel>system, neither helped. Info: Celeron 366 128 RAM, 90% free right now plenty of space on HDs Any ideas would be much appreciated... deadline approaching fast!! Thanks in advance, Soozie (also posting to hardware/tech forum)

I have PS 6 and have had no problems...my paintings run between 65 and 120 megs. The problem you are having is probably hardware. I use two hard drives , the second hard drive is partioned into 3 drives which I use for swap disks. Another part of the problem can be ram. My pentium 3 has 712 megs of ram, and my pentium 4 has 512 megs of sd ram. Prior to these upgrades, I locked up constantly and was reformatting about every six weeks. Dell was going broke supporting me.

Try and disable the MMXCore plug-in (Photoshop 7.0Plug-InsAdobe Photoshop OnlyExtensions folder) by renaming it (MMXCore.8bx file to MMXCore.old)

Try this and see if it helps (the MMXCore.8bx plug-in optimizes speed in processors and may cause conflicts that often appear when you use Photoshop because few other applications access memory as rapidly as Photoshop does).

:)
retrocity

hi guys thanks for the suggestions before i tried anything more exciting, i reduced the graphics acceleration again (control psanel> system)and that did the trick>>> not sure what that does, but nothing else seems affected - weird that it was running ok before tho'... (the image i originally had the prob with was one layer@300pxl, so no big deal... cheers, sooz