Photoshop CS5 applications crashing on quitting

Adobe recently released its latest CS5 productivity suite for the Mac, and a few people have been experiencing a problem where applications (particularly Photoshop) seem to be crashing when they are quit. The program will otherwise run just fine.

Usually this type of problem happens when a resource the program needs is not properly available to the program. The program can read and load all the settings it needs when starting up, or use default settings if settings files are not readable, but when quitting if it cannot save these settings then it may hang or crash.

The solution to this problem is to ensure that the current user has full read and write access to the resources that Adobe applications use. One way to do this is to get information on any Adobe-related items in the following folders, and ensure your user account has both read and write access to them. Click the small plus sign (after authenticating by clicking the lock) and add your account to the list of users and groups, and then give your account both read and write permissions.

User Library items:

/username/Library/Preferences/
/username/Library/Application Support/
/username/Library/Adobe/

Global Library items:

/Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/
/Macintosh HD/Library/Adobe/

Another method for doing this which may be more thorough (especially for people who upgraded from Adobe CS4) is to uninstall the Adobe CS5 suite, preparing the system for it, and then reinstalling the new version.

Adobe provides an uninstaller that is located in /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers/ so run it and follow the onscreen instructions. Then restart your system. After this is done, run Adobe's CS5 cleaner tool, which helps resolve problems that may affect the CS5 installation. The tool is available at the Adobe Web site.

After the tool has been run, perform general maintenance on your system by booting into Safe Mode and running a permissions fix with Disk Utility. Then optionally run the cleanup and cache-clearing routines with a mantenance utility like OnyX, and reboot. After this is done, run the installer for Adobe CS5 again and you should be up and running without the crashes.

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