Participant

Answered

Unable to save, error message pops up " "could not complete your request because of program error"

Forum|Forum|6 months ago
January 5, 2026
9 replies
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I am using Photoshop 7. Yes, I know it is very old. However it has been working fine after the technician installed it on my new Asus windows 11 computer. Yesterday, I began getting the error message "could not complete your request because of program error", whenever I tried to save, or save as my work. I tried hiding my layers, flattening my layers and increasing photoshops cache to 6. Does anyone know of any possible fixes for this, other than reinstalling the program? I don't know if I could reinstall it myself, I would probably have to pay the technician who installed it the first time to do it again. Thank you.

Windows

Correct answer Jeff Arola

Your scratch disk is on a separate partition, which would have another drive letter like E and not just a new folder on the C drive?

Then you would change the scratch disk by pressing the Ctrl + Alt keys just after starting the launch of Photoshop 7

and point to the other partition that might be E.

When you use Ctrl + Alt keys just after starting the launch of Photoshop 7 to get the Scratch Disk Preferences dialog are there any other drives listed besides C (Startup)?

I don't think an uninistall/reinstall will solve the issue of the scratch disk.

If your leery about partitioning the drive on a brand new computer, you could try an external drive formatted

to NTFS.

Another option is to see if your computer has the ability to add another internal drive so you could just get a

small drive like 128 GB, which would be plenty for Photoshop 7's scratch disk.

Jeff Arola

Correct answer

Community Expert

Your scratch disk is on a separate partition, which would have another drive letter like E and not just a new folder on the C drive?

Then you would change the scratch disk by pressing the Ctrl + Alt keys just after starting the launch of Photoshop 7

and point to the other partition that might be E.

When you use Ctrl + Alt keys just after starting the launch of Photoshop 7 to get the Scratch Disk Preferences dialog are there any other drives listed besides C (Startup)?

I don't think an uninistall/reinstall will solve the issue of the scratch disk.

If your leery about partitioning the drive on a brand new computer, you could try an external drive formatted

to NTFS.

Another option is to see if your computer has the ability to add another internal drive so you could just get a

small drive like 128 GB, which would be plenty for Photoshop 7's scratch disk.

N

nicketti8Author

Participant

Yes, The scratch disc partition had been created when the technician

installed photoshop for me. Thank-you SO much for telling how to reset my scratch disc settings as the program booted up. Since I was able to do that, It seems to be working normally! I only wish I knew what happened to cause the problem in the first place. It had been working fine for over a year. I guess I'll never know. Thank-you to all of you for your suggestions.

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

How much free space is on your drive?

Photoshop 7 won't run without the "scratch disk full" message if the drive it's installed on or the drive used for scratch disk

has 1 TB or more of free space.

You can change the scratch disk by pressing the Ctrl + Alt keys just after starting the launch of Photoshop 7.

The Photoshop scratch disk can be on the drive you have PS 7 installed on (Startup), another internal or external drive

or a drive partition smaller than 1 TB in free space or a combination of more than one drive.

Photoshop CS (ps ver 😎 and later don't have that issue about drive free space.

N

nicketti8Author

Participant

My scratch disc has 14.92 GB free space. It is separate from my C drive which has 1133.04 GB free space. I decided to try uninstalling it and reinstalling it. Now it won't install, and I still get the message Photoshop cannott initialize because scratch disk full......

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

I would try a reset of the Photoshop 7 preferences by holding down the Shift+Ctrl+Alt keys just after starting the launch of Photoshop 7. Keep holding the keys down until you get a dialog that asks if you want to Delete the Adobe Photoshop Settings File.

Click on Yes

(ypu have to be quick about pressing the Shift+Ctrl+Alt keys just after starting the launch of Photoshop 7

or you won't get the above delete settings dialog)

N

nicketti8Author

Participant

Well, unfortunately, I tried this and now when I start Photoshop 7, I recieve an error message "Could not initialize photoshop because the scratch discs are full". I went into my scratch disc and moved everything to a folder on my C drive and tried again. I still get this new error message 😞

A

AxelMatt

Community Expert

I am using Photoshop 7. Yes, I know it is very old. However it has been working fine after the technician installed it on my new Asus windows 11 computer. Yesterday, I began getting the error message "could not complete your request because of program error", ...

By @nicketti8

Photoshop 7 is 14 years old and it isn't compatible with newer operation systems.

What you can try is to run Photoshop in the "Compatibility Mode" on Windows 11. Do a right-click on its executable or shortcut, then select "Properties". Go to the "Compatibility" tab, check "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" and choose an older Windows version from the dropdown. Click "Apply" and then "OK".

Then check if it's work.

My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 25H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 9 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI

Kevin Stohlmeyer

Community Expert

@AxelMatt try 23 year ago. V7 was in 2002!

A

AxelMatt

Community Expert

@Kevin Stohlmeyer You're right!!! Apparently, I couldn't do any math yesterday in the evening.

My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 25H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 9 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI

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