What is up with the current update? NONE of my preferences or workspace stay when restarting, and I had to uncheck the graphics processor in order to keep from freezing. Any suggestions on how to get Photoshop back to running smoothly?

The very first thing to do is a complete reset of preferences. There is most likely corruption here. Go into your user account and find the “Adobe Photoshop 2026 Settings” folder. Move it to the desktop so a new one can be rebuilt. This returns the application to clean, out-of-the-box factory state.

If that doesn’t help, a deeper look. Then something is preventing preferences from being correctly written at shutdown. That could be a permissions issue in your OS user account. It could also be a GPU that crashes or prevents the proper shutdown sequence. Or something else causing irregular shutdowns.