Known Participant

Question

Why do I get a spinning beach ball on the first file-open?

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
July 6, 2026
11 replies
74 views

Hi There. I am running the lastest stable version of Illustrator on my M4 Macbook Pro on Tahoe. I have recently started having an issue where I can load Illustrator, no trouble there... but upon opening the first file, or creating a new doc, the file opens, but then I get the spinning ball for about a minutes before it goes away and the panels appear. This only happens on the first file open...not on launch, and not on subsequent file opens. Things I have tried:

removing all fonts,
killing and rebuilding font cache,
trashing and rebuilding preferences,
uninstalling CC and reinstalling, l
logging out and in to CC, with reboots between...

I can work with this, but it's SUPER annoying and doesn't happen on my other Macs. Just this one and just recently... Any ideas? Thanks!

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @Bejamine Freedman

I’m sorry to hear about your experience. Would you mind trying to run Illustrator under a different administrator account (macOS) and checking if it helps? If the problem persists, try the following steps and share your observations:

- Close all Adobe applications.

- Rename the UXP folder to UXP.old from the following location:

(macOS) Navigate to Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Adobe/UXP

- Relaunch Illustrator

Looking forward to your response.
Anubhav

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Bejamine FreedmanAuthor

Known Participant

Hi there, Anubhav. Thanks for the reply.

When I create a new admin user, the delay is gone… however when I switch back to my normal user, the delay is back again :(

I tried renaming the UXP file per your directions, and that did not help…

What’s the next step?

Thanks! -Ben

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @Bejamine Freedman

Thanks for the confirmation. Would you mind trying to manually reset Illustrator's preferences under your normal account and checking if it helps:

• Close all Adobe applications.

• Go to the following locations

• ~/Library/Caches

• ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe

• ~/Library/Preferences

• Rename Adobe Illustrator, com.adobe.illustrator and Adobe Illustrator 30 Settings folders to Adobe Illustrator.old, com.adobe.illustrator.old and Adobe Illustrator 30 Settings.old

• Launch Illustrator from the Creative Cloud.

Note: Location starting with this "~" sign indicates the User Library, which is hidden. So, you need to copy & paste the exact path in spotlight search or from Finder Menu > Go > Go to Folder > Paste the location in the dialog box.

Disclaimer: Please note that renaming preferences folders will remove all the custom settings, and Illustrator will launch with default settings. You can also save a backup of the folders in case you want to. The location is mentioned above.

Looking forward to your response.
Anubhav

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

What kind of hardware does the MacBook Pro have (CPU type, amount of RAM, etc)?

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Bejamine FreedmanAuthor

Known Participant

Like I said, it’s an M4 Macbook Pro. It has 24GB of RAM… I’m not sure why this would matter, as I mentioned it’s only recently started to happen, so it was working just fine with this CPU and RAM until recently… Do you think this could be pertinent to the issue?

Thanks! - Ben

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

Some Mac notebooks can tend to be equipped with too little RAM. 24GB is a decent amount. Many of MacBooks have 16GB or only 8GB of RAM; I don’t think either of those amounts is enough to run current versions of Adobe applications like Illustrator in an acceptable manner.

I assume your computer is having these issues with Illustrator while no other apps are running in the background, right? I would wonder if there are other system processes interfering with Illustrator. My computers are on the Windows platform; Windows can be pretty bad about various background processes fighting with apps. And the system has to be periodically cleaned of temporary files and other gunk that builds up.

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