Followup:Corrupted Organizer still won't open

Question

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Here's what I've done so far:
To recap, Organizer won't open, it gets stuck 3/4 way into opening and gives a message Out of Memory. I have 512+ megs of RAM and no other problems with anything...XP Home w/SP2. Everything else working great and 40 gig hard drive.
I went to My Computer, Documents & Settings, All Users, Application Data, Adobe, Catalog Folders as suggested. In the File called Catalogs, under Catalog Folders, I find 3 .psa files, which represent the three catalogs I have made. I can double click on two of them and they open right up,and I am thrilled to be in Organizer again at last!..but the third one is my main, large catalog of everything important and it gets stuck and Out of Memory message again appears. Nor can I open that catalog from the other catalogs. So it's clear that my main catalog is the problem. Then I went to Catalog folders and changed the tn.4.cache file for that catalog to tn.4.cache-old as suggested, and tried to open Organizer from the PSE icon on my desktop. No go, same problem.
Here's my new question: it seems to me that my tags are lost in any case. Even if PSE had started building a new thumbnail cache, they wouldn't be tagged, would they? So I am thinking now of deleting the .psa file of my main catalog, opening Organizer from one of the other .psa files, and then just starting over from scratch myself and building a new catalog, and this time, divide my photos over several new catalogs instead of just one, having learned from this experience. Still seems easier to me than uninstalling and reinstalling the whole program. What do you think? I want my Organizer back!!! :-)

Answer 1

Have you tried a catalog recover? I think you can do that by holding down the ctrl key while double clicking the problematic .psa file. Hopefully an expert will jump in and correct me if I don't have that right.
What about a reset of the preferences file? I think that is shift, ctrl, alt while opening the program. Again, someone correct me if I don't have it correct.
A lot of people have huge catalogs and don't seem to have problems. Do you do a recover regularly? Multiple catalogs is discouraged unless they have quite separate uses. Rather than multiple catalogs you might just want to make a regular backup of the .psa file.
Your tags aren't lost until you give up on the catalog. I don't think the thumbnails would have any effect on them. If you are familiar with access I suppose you could open the file from there and see if there are any obvious problems. I have no idea how you would do that.