Hmmmm aren't patterns raster to begin with? Patterns can be scaled but not rotated. I would define new patterns for each angle needed. When you are in Free Transform it's better to use the menu at top and enter exact angle. Shift works fine if the angles needed are in increments of 15º.

What are the dimensions of your image? Are you in RGB mode? Are you selecting JPEG in the Save for Web & Devices window? Do you have optimized checked?

I expected more going from CS to CS4 considering the price of upgrades. I got the Standard Suite with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat 9 Pro and Bridge. I picked a month at lynda.com as my bonus. It took an extra couple of months to go through every single tutorial they had on those programs.

Content-aware fill is new to CS5. Content-aware scale was new to CS4.

"Content-aware fill" and "puppet warp" look interesting if they really work. I'm sure a lot depends on the type of backgrounds. I think new in CS4 was the "content-aware scale". It works to some extent but not impressive. A couple of features I really like with CS4 is the "rotate view tool", the zoom of 3200% (I believe it was previously 1600%) and the flick panning. Photomerge is much improved.   

CS4 will have to do me for a while. I went from CS to CS4 the first week of January this year. It's just not worth the expense to upgrade with each version. What are some of the new WOW features of CS5?

Attached Link: Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error. Sorry, but this error is unrecoverable.

Here is something I found although it's regarding CS2 it might be of some help.

I don't have a Mac but I do know you can go to Window > Application Frame to toggle it off and on. You can see through Photoshop or not.  

I would look at the number of fonts you have installed. Too many fonts will really slow it down or crash.

I have CS4. Does this happen with all images dragged from Bridge to Photoshop or is it Camera Raw images? With Camera Raw the Workflow Options window has a "Open in Photoshop as Smart Objects" check box.

I've had Bitstream Font Navigator (comes with CorelDraw). I have approximately 20,000 fonts. I had to spend some time setting up font groups so I can install what I want when I want it. I never have more than 1,000 fonts installed at any one time. Actually I have 1,153 installed at the moment. Think it's time to uninstall a couple of hundred. But it's just a matter of dragging and dropping to install/uninstall.

You can do a white ring. On top put a gradient of brown to brown (exact same color) but lowering opacity at one end. Once you get the proper opacity for the gradient end stop you can use that same opacity when doing the other colors.

That turned out pretty good. Only thing I notice missing is the drop shadow on the top left falling inside the ring. The 1 is a different font but that wouldn't matter as long as all the 1's were the same.

You can do it in Photoshop with no problem.
Create the different layers.
Make 2 gradients or each of your 4 colors for Layer 1 & 3.

Layer 5: SAMPLE - Probably not needed
Layer 4: the number 1 - white with a slight drop shadow and maybe a bit of bevel
Layer 3: Ring with drop shadow. Gradient #2  blue to light blue
Layer 2: semi circle inside ring. Colored solid white with a 20-25% transparency
Layer 1: background within ring. Gradient #1 light blue to white

Duplicate all your layers onto new documents before applying the gradients. Image will be exactly the same. Only the color will change when you apply gradients.

It couldn't be done in one shot. You would have to apply the different color gradients to 2 of the 5 layers of the image ... the outside ring with drop shadow and the background within the ring. Did you make this image and have it in layers or is it an image you found?

That's great. Although it wasn't a problem for me it's good to know. Learn something new everyday. That would be "Pen and Input Devices" in the control panel on Vista.