Illustrator CS4 crashes after start-up.... PLEASE HELP!!

Question

Every time I open Illustrator CS4, it seems as if it is going to open normally.... the program interface starts to build.... and then the little start up box starts to load... and then POOF!!! it closes itself in a split second out of NOWHERE. why is this happening and can anyone help me??? please!! I love illustrator CS4 and have gotten quite used to features such as live trace and as I can't find any other type of program that has a feature like that for instantly and elegantly turning bitmaps into vectors, I am currently stuck in the middle of all my projects!!!! please help me....

Answer 1

so how do i disable/ delete the fonts that may be causing the problem? i don't know how to do that, even tho i've tried numerous times to the best of my knowledge ever since you told me it could be the cause. also, i haven't installed any fonts, so could that still be the problem?
Probably not.
what do you mean by a "scratch disk"?
In the Illustrator Preferences there is a setting for a scratch disk I d not know how you access the preferences on a PC someone else will have to help you with this what is a hard disk space allocated as a kind of virtual memory
for the tasks you are doing in Illustrator it is good to have a dedicated partition with enough free clear continuous space to absorb the amount of work that is being asked of Illustrator.
One of the reasons for this is that Illustrator has unlimited undos available to it so all the work done by Illustrator in a given session has to written somewhere in a sort of cache file this can take a lot of space and if it is not continuous
it has to piece all this together and that sometimes causes problems. It would probably be a good feature to free up this cache or virtual memory other than quitting and relaunching. So that is what this is all about the scratch disk.
and how do i trash my preferences?
Trash the prefs: +C:\Users\[your name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Illustrator+ on Win Vista.
i'm running windows xp and i've tried to find out how to do all this but all the instructions i find are for mac
In your case I believe it is in the C:/Documents and Settings but you have to look a little further down the hierarchy.
please help and thanks for everything....
Perhaps Mylenium or some one else can direct you to where you have to go on XP.
Also it just occurred to me…did you activate the application? If you did not it will always crash on startup.