I just can't TRUST you any longer Adobe (major gripes)

Question

I bought a Macbook Pro 17, upgraded the Ram, loaded only one program (actually Design Premium), and completed all updates and started in working on all my images from this summer in Alaska. I even went out to purchase the Apple Cinema Display to view and work strictly in Bridge and Camera Raw for editing, before converting into Photoshop to finalize.
So, now that I have spent over $7,ooo what have I found:
1. Bridge is displaying whatever previews it wants and clearing the cache does absolutely nothing to help and in fact is a poor system to purge the cache, as it instantly starts building the thumbnails again before you even say OK and thus the problems are once again there.
I have tried every option within reason to correct this. Set up a root cache folder. Elected to only show HQ previews when viewing versus allowing them to be built all at once. I have waited for the previews or thumbnails to be built and allowed the notebook to do its job and waited the 5-6 minutes and not touched anything in hopes of success only to see the images I click on in content and the preview image is again NOT THE SAME IMAGE!!
I cannot right click on that image in content window and ask to rebuild the preview image but have to do the whole process again and again it fails, no matter what option I choose.
I can open the image in ARC and make a slight correction to get that preview image back, but then later it will change again and show some other image from some other folder or even my trash can when I click on the thumbnail.
There is no way you can call this a light table for editing and selecting images.
2. So I made way the best I could through this and spent several hours just selecting images to edit later. I did not do anything but empty the cache again and now all those tags for selected images are gone! Hours of work - GONE! I did not throw away the cache folder which would cause this, but only purged the cache and set the option to show HQ preview when image selected. So all my labels are now gone!
I have opened images in Photoshop using the Open Image and can't wait to actually finish editing images, but I first must be able to select, label, and edit with Camera Raw before I can go into Photoshop and at this rate, I am spending ALL my time just trying to get Bridge to show the correct image in the Preview Panel. ITS NOT HAPPENING!!!
$7,000 for a system just to edit photos using Adobe products which they advertise as the best for such use and yet I cannot get one product to work. Bridge.
What gives?!!!
I am losing all faith in Adobe and know calling customer support only to speak with someone in India who cannot even pronounce, much less spell, my name and won't have any understanding of this is not an option I look forward to.
I am in San Antonio right now but do live in Seattle, in Fremont, near the bridge... and am more than willing to cut my vacation short and miss the holidays with my family this Christmas just to come to your office with my system to find a solution.
What will it take to get this corrected. I have spent money on your products, now can we get them to work?
Yes, I am upset. And have no faith nor trust in your company right now. Please, help correct this mess and restore my faith, and trust. When can we meet and what will it take?
Randal

Answer 1

I, too, have found Bridge very unstable. I find this to be extremely disappointing, seeing as it's literally the most expensive piece of software I've ever purchased for personal use. I've seen these two symptoms:
1. When running in full screen mode, Bridge crashes periodically. This happened on Vista, so I blamed Vista (of course), but even after regressing to XP SP2, I see the same symptoms.
2. Although I didn't see this on Vista, running on XP I see the problem described earlier in this thread, where clicking on a thumbnail displays the wrong image preview. When this happens the image displayed is one from a different folder! I solve the problem by clearing the cache, and it's OK for a while, but the problem keeps returning.
3. Even when exiting cleanly from Bridge (using File->Exit), Bridge often forgets where I was working in my previous session. I need to re-navigate from the very top level directory down through the hierarchy to my photo directory.
Again, it's very disappointing to invest so much in a single software package only to see such basic operations malfunction.