Neural Filters fail with "We've temporarily disabled this filter because of an error" when the Windows username contains a non-ASCII character

SUMMARY

All Neural Filters that load a local AI model fail with "We've temporarily

disabled this filter because of an error" if the Windows user profile path

contains a non-ASCII character (e.g. C:\Users\Jørgen).

ENVIRONMENT

Photoshop 27.8.0 x64

Windows 10 22H2 (build 19045)

NVIDIA RTX 5060, driver 32.0.15.9649

(also reproduced previously on an AMD Radeon card)

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

1. Use a Windows account whose profile path contains a non-ASCII character,

  e.g. C:\Users\Jørgen (æ ø å ä ö ü é ñ ç etc.)

2. Open any 8-bit RGB image.

3. Filter > Neural Filters > Photo Restoration.

4. Toggle the filter on, or raise any slider above 0.

EXPECTED

The filter processes the image.

ACTUAL

"We've temporarily disabled this filter because of an error."

The error appears on ANY non-zero slider value. Leaving every slider at 0

(i.e. no inference) produces no error.

AFFECTED FILTERS

Photo Restoration, Skin Smoothing, Colorize, Depth Blur, Color Transfer

- i.e. all filters that run a downloaded local model.

ROOT CAUSE

Neural Filter models are stored under:

%APPDATA%\Adobe\UXP\PluginsStorage\PHSP\27\Internal\com.adobe.nfp.gallery\

The local inference engine cannot open a model file whose path contains a

non-ASCII character, so the model never loads and the generic "temporarily

disabled" error is shown. This looks like a Unicode/ANSI path-handling bug

in the model loader.

PROOF

Launching Photoshop with USERPROFILE, APPDATA and LOCALAPPDATA set to the

8.3 short name of the SAME profile folder (C:\Users\USERNA~1 - identical

directory, ASCII string only) makes every Neural Filter work immediately.

Same machine, same install, same GPU, same Photoshop version.

Creating a new Windows account with a plain ASCII name also works.

All three variables are required; overriding APPDATA alone is not enough.

ALREADY RULED OUT

- Reinstalling Photoshop

- Deleting the Neural Filters cache and re-downloading all models

- Latest release and Beta

- Signing out and back in

- Resetting preferences

- GPU: reproduces on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware

- Help > GPU Compatibility passes. System Info shows the correct GPU,

 isGPUCapable: 1, isGPUAllowed: 1,

 "Neural Filters (Registered) 1.15.0.105",

 "Plugins that failed to load: NONE"

IMPACT

Affects any user whose Windows username contains a non-ASCII character,

which is common across Scandinavia, Germany, France, Spain and elsewhere.

The error message gives no indication of the cause, so affected users

typically spend a long time on reinstalls, GPU driver updates and version

downgrades that cannot fix it.