Flash 5 freezes confirmed by Macromedia; possible work-arounds

David Kalwitz reports of a problem with Macromedia Flash 5: "Flash 5 freezes my G4 about every 20 minutes or so. It usually occurs directly after I've clicked on one of the panels or the timeline. When it causes the freeze I'm unable to force quit Flash 5, instead I have no other option but to hit the reboot button." Macromedia is aware of the problem and say they are working to resolve it. They are especially looking at font corruption as a possible cause. In the meantime, Tech Support suggested several possible work-arounds, none of which worked for David. "The most helpful advice was to do frequent "Save As" as it also performs the function of compacting the file. This is an undocumented feature and it does seem to help for awhile but ultimately the freezing will begin to occur again." Here is the full list of Macromedia's suggestions: Do a "Save As" often, instead of just a save. Think of "Save As" as "Save and Compact" - this will clean up your FLA files. It takes longer than a standard Save, but it's worth it to do it sometimes. This is not documented at this time. Change the number of "undo" items to something you really need - the default is "100", (I think), and most people really only use about 20 - at any rate, less than 100. This by itself shouldn't affect much except the next step. Delete unused library items (from the library options menu). If the symbol is part of your "undo" stack, it remains so you can "undo"... so keeping the undo stack smaller, and/or closing, reopening, then deleting unused library items will also give you cleaner .fla files. Delete your temp files. Deleting temp files for OS 9 users have helped. Run the AppleScript available here to delete them. Keep the sounds panel closed. Pull it out of the panel group it's in, and close it altogether. Open it only when you need to use it, and close it again. We don't have this confirmed yet at all, so there's no documentation- but some users have stopped crashing after keeping the panel closed, so it's worth a shot. Macromedia concluded by saying: "If these steps do not help then it may be necessary to go back to Flash 4 temporarily. We will have a fix for this problem. We just don't have any concrete information on when."

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