Little rant: -only- PS is rebooting my pc

Question

Hi all,
I must vent this to get it off my chest, and to see if there will be more constructive comments than I found on this list.
I'm running a W7x64 pc, with 8Gb of Ram on a AMD X6/Gigabyte combo. My graphics card is a Geforce 9800GTX, and I use a Wacom Intuos 4.
All of this stuff is supported by CS4 and CS5.
All of my apps, including some heavy duty 3D apps and render-engines, video-editing software and some audio applications stress my system on a daily basis without even blinking. For rendering 3D images or sequences it's no exception most of the RAM is taken most of the time.
But Photoshop, CS4 (x32 or x64), or even CS 5(x64) that I downloaded as a trial, will crash my pc on a regular basis. Heck even d&d'ing a layer from one image to another will do this, or scaling, or saving, or just moving the mouse....
Why is it that all my other apps run flawlessly, but when PS is mentioned, the forums can only state, bad mobo, bad RAM, bad GPU, old drivers... Over and over again.
This holds no water when all -other- apps that pound on my system will work just fine!!
And yes, the renderengines and 3D apps rely heavily on the OpenGL engine on the graphic card as well for GUI or texture memory.
And yes, I run all the latest drivers for the hardware, mobo, graphics, wacom etc. etc. as always opted in the replies. And no, so far this hasn't helped a bit.
I'm not the only one that came across this serious annoyance, and it has costed me countless hours -and- corrupted PS files.
I was hoping it was a CS 4 flaw, as previous versions of PS always ran fine. I'm suspecting PS CS4/5 is doing some weird OpenGL stuff under the hood.
Are there any other tips than, reset your prefs, update your drivers, reinstall PS, turn off all OpenGL in PS, buy a new pc?
<rant off, feels good >.
But seriously, looking at the huge amount of people having issues with this, I can use any little tip here.
rob

Answer 1

It certainly looks as though you've been thorough in your investigation.
I'd say at this point that there is some driver level issue that's causing your system problem.  It's actually pretty difficult for an application to crash Windows (crashing the application alone is another story).
It's possible that your video or tablet or even disk drivers simply have a latent bug in them that causes the problem.
Another area of software that can trash the system is the anti-virus / anti-malware / security software that you may have.
There is even hardware to consider...  Photoshop may be heating up your video card, for example, in ways that other apps don't.
I guess I'd advise these things:  Continue scour the Windows logs for further clues, and then to actively pursue a possible problem I think I'd eliminate major parts of the software.  You could, for example, very carefully try running your system without some of the major parts you have installed - e.g., after having removed whatever anti-virus software you are running.  You could also try downgrading to earlier video drivers, or even trying a different video card to see if the problem is changed.
The freeware tool AutoRuns can help you know all of the software you have starting on your system.
All I can offer is this in encouragement:  There are those of us who have absolutely stable Windows 7 x64 systems that run Photoshop all month without system trouble.  So it IS possible.
Best of luck.
-Noel