Dreamweaver4 Hangs at Splash Screen on First Use

Question

I recently moved to a new computer with 10 terabytes of hard
drive space and 4 gigs of ram running winXP2 w/sp2.
The computer itself is a generic HP Workstation XW4200 with
an old ATI FireGL graphics card - fairly vanilla.
I installed Dreamweaver4 (yes, DW4 is old but I know it's
quirks and limitations well and
I got the "educational version" free at school so call me
cheap, but anyway..)
then tried to start it up for the first time.
Just past the registration screen it hung at the splash
screen for a loooooooooooooooonnng time (over 15 minutes) and I
figured it was permanently locked up so I shut it down, rebooted,
and tried again with the same result.
I uninstalled and re-installed the program, same result.
I figured maybe something in Windows was conflicting so I
took an hour to do a reinstall of a totally clean version of winxp
sp2 (with nothing else installed).
After installing Dreamweaver 4 for the third time it still
hung indefinitely.
Finally I started googling around and found an obscure
reference on a Linux forum about installing DW4 under wine and
having it hang on initial startup while scanning all drives and/or
looking for Internet Explorer.
So I booted up WinXP in Safe Mode, and set the compatibility
properties to run in Win98 compatibility mode, and tried starting
up dreamweaver.exe yet again.
The cursor goes into hourglass mode for 10 seconds as the
splash screen is displayed, then returns to a normal cursor except
when passing directly over the splashscreen.
Out of curiosity I started a small notepad window and dragged
it momentarily in front of the dreamweaver splash screen window and
when I moved it outside the splash screen window the image of the
notepad window remained --meaning the splash screen was too busy
doing something else to allow a window refresh.
This lead me to focus on a very busily flashing led light
signaling activity for my hard drive array.
It was very busy blinking away even though I shut down
notepad and nothing else was running except dreamweaver (I even
checked Task Manger to make sure no process/thread that involved
the hard drive...like a search indexing..was happening --but
dreamweaver was the only thing banging away at my RAID collection
of internal hard drives).
So I decided to let it run while I watched a TV show and 47
MINUTES later the rest of dreamweaver finally surfaced!!
Was it searching for Internet Explorer?
..or maybe indexing drives/directories for the Site
Manager..who knows?!
But after saving an initial default site and restarting,
dreamweaver took less than 15 seconds to load after that.
To all those running Dreamweaver 4 under WinXP with
multi-terabyte raid collections be warned!
I doubt Adobe will issue a patch around this issue at this
late date but I know I'm not the only one still running DW4 and
after searching for hours in Google I found little or no
documentation for this particular issue so let this thread be it .

Answer 1

Now then Joshua Weeman,
it appears you have fallen foul of one of the first rules: "Never buy top of the line hardware". Get the middle range and your'e in tried and tested territory. Same goes for software. FCP 2 is a beta to all intents and purposes, Color is a fresh port of Final Touch, and again, is a beta program. Spending loads of money on gear does not mean you will get flawless workflow, it just means you spent a huge wad. You can not, in all reasonableness, blindly believe the claims of vendors, even the fine folks at Cupertino ['send to' commands anyone?], they all tell fibs. All software has it's dark nasty little secrets, look up Captain Mench and his fine tutorials to find out more. With the system you have right now you are sorted for years of fun, time to start reading the manuals and the small print, All the information you need is within ten feet of where you are sitting and these fine forums contain anything that isn't.