PSE6 crash possible catalog fix

[brianrobbins]

I had been sufferring from repeated freezes and crashes in PSE6 organizer and tried most suggestions other than complete re-install. I made many attempts to repair the catalog to no avail. A few days ago, on a desperate whim, I renamed four catalog files (with the program closed), like so

backupCt.datXXX
collstatus.datXXX
tagstatus.datXXX
thumb.5.cacheXXX

(note I added the XXX to the filenames so the program would not find them and would have to regenerate them. I just picked the files that all were dated the present day, really just whimsy on my part)

and then reopened the organizer and let it regenerate the files overnight ( I have over 10,000 files - jpg, tif, cr2, gif, etc). In the a.m. I rebooted, opened the organizer and selected the repair option and let it run. Then I closed the organizer and rebooted again. I have gone through several organizer, editor, tagging and categorizing cycles since with no freezes or crashes. Ordinarily I would have had several freeze ups by now. The program would always freeze on a raw file (Canon .CR2) in the past but now seems to handle them fine. Somehow the program regenerated the necessary catalog files better once I hid them than when just selecting the "repair" menu option)


Hope this helps someone else (and hope the fix persists for me!). I had almost just given up on PSE6

[johnrellis]

Brian,

The most important thing you did was to regenerate the thumbnail cache (thumb.5.cache), which has helped many people.

Your symptoms may well come back soon, since you have many raw files, and the freezes were associated with raw files. PSE 6 has a known, severe bug handling raw files, but there is a straightforward workaround published by Adobe:

http://www.adobe.com/go/kb403728

(Use Solution 3 -- the others aren't helpful.)

[brianrobbins]

Thank you! I do indeed have a dual processor cpu and hadn't heard about this flaw.