Dreamweaver 21.7 randomly crashes. How do I diagnose?

Forum|Forum|8 days ago
February 6, 2026
3 replies
63 views

I’m using Dreamweaver 21.7 to edit a few files outside of my Wordpress site, like the styles.css and php files. I have fresh install. DS randomly crashes and closes while I’m editing. I can go 5-10 minutes, sometimes make a few saves and uploading the changed file (sometimes not) before DW just quits on me and closes down in the middle of a text edit.

This is on Windows 11 pro, all up-to-date. How can I figure out what is happening?

C

chadreitsma

Participating Frequently

Mine is randomly crashing as well. I’m reverting to a previous version.

kangaroo bar

Participant

I’m having the same issue. Restoring to a previous version fixed the problem. Tried resetting the preference file in 21.7 -- no difference. It’s clearly an Adobe bug. Previous versions were more stable. Perhaps 21.7 should be named nightmareweaver?

It’s 2026. Code should be more stable than this.

jeffb8188Author

Participating Frequently

Thanks, at least it’s nice to know I’m not crazy and someone else is having these issues. (And I used to work in software QC. I--and my company--would have been mortified if a bug like that got out the door). I’ll see if a rollback helps.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

Are you coding in LIVE or DESIGN mode? Use Ctrl + Shift + F11 to toggle between them. For coding PHP or CSS files, I prefer to keep it in DESIGN mode. It’s faster & uses less GPU resources.

Frequently save to your local hard drive (Ctrl/Cmd + S) to minimize data loss.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

jeffb8188Author

Participating Frequently

I’m coding in DESIGN mode, in the Code window. No need for anything else. The system has a Ryzen 7 5700X and 32GB of RAM; resources shouldn’t be an issue… especially since previous versions of Dreamweaver ran find on the same system for literally years before I had to do a Windows reinstall. It’s unusable if it won’t stay up and I’m constantly losing my edits, even if I save often and it’s just the last few minutes worth.

So back to my question--is there a way to diagnose the failure?

B

Ben M

Community Expert

I’m coding in DESIGN mode, in the Code window. No need for anything else. The system has a Ryzen 7 5700X and 32GB of RAM; resources shouldn’t be an issue… especially since previous versions of Dreamweaver ran find on the same system for literally years before I had to do a Windows reinstall. It’s unusable if it won’t stay up and I’m constantly losing my edits, even if I save often and it’s just the last few minutes worth.

So back to my question--is there a way to diagnose the failure?

Are you getting a crash report when it crashes from Adobe? That log could give insights into what is causing the issue.

Also you mention that you had to do a Windows reinstall. Did you try to restore your profiles from before that crash as part of that reinstall? Sometimes there have been unexplainable issues with Adobe software when restoring or moving OS data such as using tools to move files from an old computer to a new one where they typically recommend fresh installs vs. trying to restore or save old data such as application or user profile data. If you wanted to test, you could setup a new user profile on the computer and see if DW produces the same crash in that new profile.

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