CS4 crashes regularly

Question

Hi,
As others have already reported, I'm also experiencing repeated crashes
when using CS4. This can happen at any time:
- when loading an image
- when creating or modifying a selection
- when editing the image
No obvious pattern detected. After the crash, when I relaunch PS, I
often (not always) get a message telling me that GPU acceleration/
OpenGL drawing has been disabled. However, I also had crashes with
OpenGL drawing disabled.
I'm using a Windows XP Pro SP3, a GeForce 6600 GT with the latest driver
(version 178.24, October 15, 2008) and the motherboard is an ASUS
A8N-SLI Premium running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ with 3GB of
RAM.
I recently made some changes to the NVidia settings and had no crash
since then:
- Use my advanced 3D image settings
- Anisotropic filtering 16x
- Anti aliasing : 8xS
- Conformant texture clamp: Off
- Error reporting: Off
- Extension limit: Off (if you set this to On, PS crashes and disables
OpenGL drawing)
- Force MipMaps: None
- Maximum pre-rendered frames: 0
- Single display performance mode
- Texture filtering settings: Off with exception of 2
- Negative LOD Bias : Clamp
- Quality: High quality
- Threaded optimization: On
- Triple buffering: On
- Vertical Sync: Force On (also On in PS as well as "Force Bilinear
Interpolation" and "Advanced Drawing")
If this can help...
Patrick

Answer 1

I have tried out the settings suggested by Patrick with Nvidia FX3450 graphics, driver version 178.46.
So far I have had no crashes.
However I find that the changes have the effect of disabling OpenGL drawing (even though the OpenGL box remains ticked in the Performance Preferences). So smooth panning, flick panning, rotate etc don't work, and redrawing is slow. Trying to use the rotate tool, for example, gives a warning dialogue saying that the tool is only available in an OpenGL enabled workspace window. This is despite OpenGL being enabled and Photoshop apparently not having disabled it.
So I expect that we are nowhere forward except for an increased suspicion that the graphics settings have something to do with Photoshop crashing on some systems.
I think that the Photoshop engineers need to look at this further. In the meantime, does anyone know which of the above settings might cause OpenGL to be disabled? (I should point out that not all of the above appear in my Nvidia 3D settings. I only applied the changes to those that are. I've really no idea what any of them mean.)