P: "Adobe Community Help" keeps popping open (Windows)

This was almost a daily occurrence for me. I have narrowed down the events on which this 'glitch' happens.

Excessive of 2 hours use, the help window opens. It will open itself even if you don't touch Photoshop at all.
It is more prone to open based on the following user interactions:

- Use of the Layer Style Menu. (high chance)
- Use of the Shapes menu on right click in the doc.

I have found a way to 'slow' the amount of times it likes to pop up.
I disabled all start-up services excluding the Switchboard (SBSV).
I don't see it as often as I used to. But it still happens.
Dreamweaver does not do this. Only Photoshop. Very odd.
If I ignore it and continue working, after about 3 to 5 pop-ups, Ps will crash.
I have a Windows XP desktop I still own and it has Ps CS3 on it. Never had this problem.
_____________________________________

Installed Programs:
- Firefox 8.0
- Ps CS5.1 (Std)
- Dw CS5.5
- Office 2010 Student
- NAV 2012
- iTunes
- Bandicam
- Fontlab Studio 5
- Visual Studio 2010 Pro

Computer:
Gateway NV55S13u
Win 7 Ultimate (Upgrade)
1.5GHz AMD A8 quad core
6GB RAM

Hopefully you guys can solve this. Other than this, I have no complaints. I have actually learned to deal with it.

I'm happy to see Adobe is working on this issue. I experience this problem in CS4 on a regular basis and have had the same issue on older versions of Photoshop as well -- although I don't remember on which version I started experiencing it.

Adobe Community Help opens in my web browser periodically when I'm working with layer styles. When the problem occurs, sometimes I can just close help in the browser window and continue working in Photoshop. Other times I get caught in an inescapable loop -- I can't close layer styles and every click in Photoshop opens another instance of help in my browser... I have to force quite Photoshop.

I've had this issue with different PCs and different Windows OS. I do not have a Wacom tablet. Here's what my current PC is:

Dell Studio XPS 9100
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7, 930@2.80GHZ
9 GB RAM
Windows 7 64-bit

Hope Adobe is successful getting to the bottom of this one!

Brian

This is probably nothing you haven't already thought of...

I'd suggest you look to the data structures that govern the operation of your event loop, specifically in the area of F1 key (or other Help-invoking event) handling and event queue management.

Understand that when the problem happens it tends to bring up multiple copies of the Help tool, as a result of trying to do other things, implying a persistent change of one or more variables that somehow cause the event loop to mistakenly think that an event is an F1 keypress (or similar).

I don't know if it's related, but I have occasionally seen also (in older versions of PS; fortunately not in CS5) cases where the event dequeing gets skewed by a few steps - i.e., mouse operations cause something to happen right now, but the something itself is from several clicks ago. It has the feeling of Photoshop lagging behind, but it's not a lag in time but by mouse click.

As I mentioned above, I suspect bugs elsewhere (e.g., in the display driver) corrupting memory as the root cause of these sorts of things, but changes to make event loop operations more robust could certainly make Photoshop more defensive against such problems.

-Noel

Thanks muchly everyone for those details. We didn't realize how far back in time this problem extended. We've used a lot of different Help systems during that timeframe, which suggests that the Help app itself is not the root of the problem. And as far as I know, the issue doesn't occur with any Adobe products other than Photoshop.

I'll relay all the related forum threads to the Photoshop team for closer scrutiny. Could take them a while to determine the fix--this has been a real puzzle! But please post any additional details that occur to you.

Tak, Jakob for the added information!

Hi,
Just to write that we're discussing the problem in the thread PECourtejoie linked to earlier ( http://forums.adobe.com/message/3506399 ).

This has happened to me ever since I was using Photoshop 4, and I have encountered it on Photoshop 6, Photoshop 7 and Photoshop CS (which I'm currently using). To be specific: On every single version of Photoshop that I have ever used.

During that time, I have been using two different computers using Win XP and two different computers using Win7. Lately I have installed a Wacom Intuous 4 tablet, but the problem was there before as well.

It ALWAYS (without exception) happens when I use the colour picker tool. I can work for different amounts of time (half an hour, 2 hours or so) and at some point when I open the colour picker, a lot of help windows will open. Sometimes one or two, sometimes 25.

At this point Photoshop displays three different kinds of behaviour:
1. Either it crashes,
2. or it keeps opening help windows whenever i minimize or close the windows already open and click on the photoshop tab to go to this window,
3. or it is possible to continue working as if nothing has happened. No other windows open and it is possible to keep working. Somtimes another bug appears after some time, though (making it impossible to save), so I usually restart Photoshop no matter what behaviour it displays.

I have tried removing the F1 shourtcut to the Help page, thinking that perhaps a memory overflow was triggering a F1 keystroke in some way. This didn't solve the problem though, as the help page keeps popping up, whether a shoutcut has been assigned or not.

As this has happened on so many computers, different operating systems and configurations as well as different versions of Photoshop, I think the problem is connected to the Photoshop program itself and not to third party programs etc. I have no technical knowledge to back this up though, only intuition :)

Let me know if you need more details.

Greetings from Denmark!
Jakob Kramer

Mark, here are other current cases about the issue, (especially for troubleshooting) I could contact the users if needed for them to post here, or you could join there: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3506399

This site reposts old discussions of the U2U, also point to low resources: http://www.clearps.com/photoshop-foru...

Adobe Help Community popup window opens when holding down Ctrl and using the mouse to resize an object. I'm seeing that holding down keyboard buttons for an extended period of time and doing some other action causes this window to open.

CS5
Windows 7
Intuos 3 installed (but not used within this scenario)

(Hello, Mark, nice to "see" you!)
FYI I remember from the user to user forum that the issue happened in way older version of Photoshop (pre community help, Look at this thread from another forum in 2005: http://www.photoshopgurus.com/forum/p...)
But I think most of the cases were on the Windows platform.

Yeah, I've gotten used to having to do that.