Why is Illustrator CC 2017 full of bugs?

[Guest]

Is anybody else finding Illustrator CC 2017 to be really problematic?

I'm getting hanging, crashes, graphics card acceleration problems, and documents not opening when double-clicking them from file explorer. Affecting my productivity and I'm not happy. CC 2015 had it's fair share of problems. All Adobe seems to care about is Cloud library integration, changing dialog boxes so that they have rounded edges and not about the basic core operation functionality of Illustrator. It is slower than what I was using 15 years ago!!!

Come on Adobe, get your act together.

[runninghead_design]

I've gone through the usual uninstall/restart/reinstall/restart/uninstall/reinstall older version/restart...etc process again today and lost an afternoon's work.

Clients not happy of course.

Re: Monika's Reply

Live Paint - awesome tool - surprised to hear it doesn't pre-date 2000.

Width Tool- also awesome but kinda feel it should have been standard since 2000. Was it really that hard to develop considering the app is vector based anyway?

Recolour artwork and Multiple Artboards- great for anyone who actually uses those features, I assume.

Livetrace/ImageTrace- has been ruined for no good reason.

Auto Pattern Brush Corners- useful but buggy.

3D live effects- buggy, avoid using them.

So on the whole I'd say that yes- Adobe have tinkered with a lot of whizzy stuff while ignoring the most basic, and perhaps most common, feature request- that the damn thing should just work.

Y'know- fix basic features and stop the app from crashing.

I suspect we're all high milage in this thread

[bruce2400]

I go back to my original post.  Adobe is aware there are bugs.  Since my post just a little less than a month ago, Adobe has released 2 updates to Illustrator.  They are now on 21.0.2.  Adobe released 2 updates in a little over a week span.  I have not seen Adobe do that in years.  Normally you will see an update once every other month tops. 

If you read the release notes the changes are not security they are stability fixes.  So I go back to what I said, they are aware of the problems.  The solution from Adobe is to go back to 2015.  At our company many users use Illustrator all day long and they complain to me daily about issues.  We can't go back to 2015 so the users have to deal with the issues, change there workflows and save sooner.

I too hope Adobe fixes the problem it would be one less ticket on my desk however Adobe, just like pretty much every software company releases software full of bugs.  As users we have to learn to deal with this and try to find work-arounds or stay with older software.  Those are the answers.  It sucks and I understand the money piece to pay for software to be beta testers, it's no right but not much else you can do but keep submitting tickets to Adobe about the issue.  Hopefully one day they will release a patch that fixes the issues and next time don't update until months after a release has been out.

[Vonster]

Monika,

You know I like you, so take this the right way.

To be fair letting an algorithm build your corner art or any art for that matter is one of the core problems of Ai. It's a pro app and a pro should build their own art not let a machine with no clue about aesthetics attempt it. Adobe is catering to noodles with stuff like this and it ultimately facilitates poor craftsmanship.

Shape building tool is OK in specifics but you have to pre-create all the ingredients to use it so in most complex cases the pathfinder method is still faster.

Live color is OK but once again not as fast if you know how to pull apart vector art and color stuff manually.

Most features like this are all half-baked and released by Adobe and could be vastly improved but are most often quickly abandoned and they move on to the next half-baked feature.

Illustrator CC 2017 is a hot mess. Today my palettes won't load? Why? Nothing has changed? I didn't install anything it just stopped working. Snapping bug is still a massive failure for the most basic vector building and this is suppose to be pro level software but it fails at an elementary level.

Sloppy engineering. No attention to detail because the ones steering the ship never use it to create anything so they simply don't know any better nor are concerned with stuff like snapping. It's a joke.

Von

[Monika Gause]

Vonster  schrieb

To be fair letting an algorithm build your corner art or any art for that matter is one of the core problems of Ai. It's a pro app and a pro should build their own art not let a machine with no clue about aesthetics attempt it. Adobe is catering to noodles with stuff like this and it ultimately facilitates poor craftsmanship.

Shape building tool is OK in specifics but you have to pre-create all the ingredients to use it so in most complex cases the pathfinder method is still faster.

Live color is OK but once again not as fast if you know how to pull apart vector art and color stuff manually.

Von,

a lot of the features are aimed at the beginner, but then: neither live paint nor shapebuilder nor the Shaper tool are meant to replace anything. They are different methods and your workflow, the objects you have and later adjustments determine which tool to use. Sometimes this is the pathfinder panel, sometimes this is something else.

The pathfinder panel is sometimes faster and other times it's not. Live paint is sometimes clever to use and other times it's not. The pro user is able to tell which tool to use when. Not using a tool out of professional "pride" or whatever would be kind of silly when the tool can make something easier to do. And it would not be professional either.

And then there are so many different users of AI. Some are doing stuff that people would call creative. Others do things that aren't creative at all and might still be professional users.

And then there are the folks who have to edit or even fix stuff done by people you would call "noodlers". For them these kinds of features are a relief.

Kind regards,

Monika

[alisters9008592]

Yes same here, suddenly I find I can't change fills or strokes of objects - I add a new stroke, and it's black, can't change it, even though I select another colour in the palette . This sucks, as I use strokes all the time 😞

[just_get_me_in]

I have consistent freezes in Ill. CC2017. I can count on the freeze happening if using certain tools. The only option is to force quite ILL. And the file is not saved in the recovery folder even though it is set to save every five minutes. So all of my open windows have to be reopened with the loss of progress. One tool that causes freezes every time is the Drop Shadow option in the Stylize menu. If you use a very small drop shadow Illustrator, it will freeze, guaranteed. Forcing you to force quit. Worse yet, the file cannot be reopened after that freeze. Everything is lost. All your work locked up in an unopenable file. 

There are other freeze issues as well but it looks like Adobe doesn't care enough to have freeze reports sent to them automatically so they can address the issues. I can't even find a report bug option on their website. Another new bug in CC2017 I've discovered is Command-clicking an object to select the object underneath with the main selection tool, only selects one part of the object below. As if you were using the Direct Selection tool. This is really maddening.

I could on about how primitive Adobe Illustrator still is after all these years in many ways. I have used other programs like Flexisign that were more advanced in 1991 than Illustrator is today. Especially in terms of better vector features and really intuitive ease of use to get things done in one or two very easy steps. Where in Illustrator it would take a dozen or more complex steps with horrible results. I really think this program needs to be redesigned from the ground up with ease of use in mind. I turn to Flexisign anytime I have to perform task that involve simple shadowing, outlining, inlining, compounding, etc. It saves me a lot of time and I end up with far better results. It had features since 1991 that Illustrator still does not have today. 

[alisters9008592]

Talk about how primitive Illustrator is! I still have to do various things in FreeHand, which Adobe bought, and killed, years ago. Many of the basic functions are far more straightforward in FreeHand - as an example, to have text, the sam way up, at the top and bottom of a circle, in FreeHand all you have to do is type a carriage return between the two bits of text… I have to use Illustrator, because FreeHand doesn't work on Intel Macs, but I keep an old machine with FreeHand on it, for the times when there's no Illustrator work-around…

Sorry, gone a bit off-topic, but really, now not being able to do such basic things as change strokes and fills…

[just_get_me_in]

One more problem I found in CC2017. It won't always convert a stroke to outlines when using the tool in the Path menu. If the stroke gets above a certain thickness, the "convert to outline" does nothing. I spend a lot of time with CC2017 just trying to find workarounds for bugs.

[MVJ-IT]

My Illustrator CC 2017 won't open at all. I have tried everything with numerous uninstalls and re-installs. What do you try if it won't even open? How do you install CC 2015 -- where do you find it? I just has CS6 in my previous versions.

[thebud]

I had this problem with InDesign and Illustrator, but got called away for a phone call only to find that InDesignwas loading. It just took 45 minutes to load. Same with Illustrator. After about a lot of futzing around, I tried this. It worked and continues to work for both InDesign and Illustrator. I posted this solution on an InDesign forum, and several people with MAC, Win7, and Win10 systems found it helped.

Follow these (yes, they sound crazy but they are pretty easy to do, and don't leave a mess that is hard to reverse.)

Try this first to see if it does the job with out further ado:

Press alt+Shift+control and click on the desktop shortcut to open the Illustrator. This will cause it to delete the preferences file and build a new one with the proper permissions for your system. That is all some people need.
If not, take these steps:

1) Update Creative Cloud to the latest version if you haven't already.

2) Make sure your Adobe ID sign in info is at hand. Then, sign out of CC and sign back in.

(In the Creative Cloud desktop app, click the gear upper right and choose preferences. Sign out and then sign back in. )
Just do it. I don’t know why this works. I discovered it by accident. It seems to solve several problems where things slow down while it checks the log-in and it's and easy thing to try.

Then, uninstall Illustrator whatever from the gear next to it in Creative Cloud Desktop App, NOT the usual Windows way. If you already used Windows to uninstall, you may have reinstall, then uninistall through CC. 

3) Sign out of CC and sign back in as in step 1. Then, install Illustrator. Be sure to uncheck “keep your preferences.” (very important.)

4) Open Illustrator **from within** the Creative Cloud app. It should open like normal and run at reasonable speed.

5) Double-click on an Illustrator file in Windows Explorer or the Finder (Apple). It should open in Illustrator normally if the file association is correct.The first time you open, it will be slow while it converts the file to the new Illustrator, but not insanely slow. After you save it in the new version, re-open should be normal.

6) I still could not open InDesign or Illustrator using the Windows 7 Start Menu or desktop shortcuts. If you can, no problem. If you can’t, do this:

7) Press alt+Shift+control and click on the desktop shortcut. This will cause it to delete the preferences file (Yes, I know you just deleted it in Step 3. It will delete it again, and this is important.) Illustrator should–at long last–open normally. And after this you can open the Windows 7 Start menu and desktop shortcuts as usual. Illustrator (and InDesign) should run at normal speed. In Illustrator, it helps to turn off Creative Cloud sync and the GPU. (Choose the .

I think the install software in the Creative Cloud might setting the properties on the preference file to "read-only." In my system, like many others, it requires admin permission to open a read-only file. Apparently, InDesign/Illustrator needs to open it and can’t. CC gets admin permission when it opens, so that is why you can open it from within the Creative Cloud desktop app. By opening InDesign/Illustrator from the a desktop shortcut and deleting the preferences file, it rebuilds a preference file with the proper permissions to open.

Hope this works for you!

[MVJ-IT]

Thank you for trying, but unfortunately it didn't work and I was very careful about following your instructions. The last message I got was

and it didn't open up. Previous messages suggested running diagnostics tests and after 25, I quite clicking the button.

I have tried uninstalling and re-installing numerous ways and with re-starting the computer and not.

I cannot get Illustrator at all. Is there anyway I can install CC2015?

[thebud]

I am so sorry that didn't work. It was worth a shot.

Yes, you can install 2015. Here is a step by step with screen shots. How to Find and Install Previous Version of Adobe Apps in CC 2015 | Adobe Customer Care Team

If previous versions don't show, scroll to the bottom of the list of categories to find the link to "find previous versions" first.  That should have a link that allows you to install 2015.

[MVJ-IT]

Thank you again thebud, but I won't need CC2015.

Believe it or not, but I have found the problem and the solution, as to why Illustrator wouldn't open up. You must go to the program files to fix this problem and possibly other problems.

The last Illustrator update did not like my Astute Graphics plugins. When uninstalling Illustrator, the Astute Graphics folders stayed in-place and each time Illustrator was re-installed, the program installed itself back into the same place, thus the existing Astute Graphics folders found themselves back inside the Illustrator plugins folder with all its other plugins. Non-original Illustrator plugins are easily identified because their file dates are different from the Illustrator file dates of 1/13/2017 (not "folder", but "file"). I moved the Astute Graphics folders completely out of the Illustrator CC2017 program files and low and behold, Illustrator opened up and worked perfectly.

Now I need to find out what to do to get my Astute Graphics plugins to work.

[carlosgarro]

You can access the new Astute Graphics unified installer.

Just log in to the website with your account and download it >>

[MVJ-IT]

Thanks Carlos. And thanks for the link, although I must admit that I am a little nervous about making any changes now that Illustrator is working, albeit without my Astute Graphics apps. I will try as soon as I have a break from using Illustrator and have the time -- just in case. Thanks again.

[lbpalm]

pure junk what a waste of time and money.

[Paul Haynes]

I agree with all of the above and more - this s now unusable - I'm just grateful it wasn't just me, I questioned my sanity!

It's now so bad I need to swap back to 2015. Adobe needs to get it's act together - it's selling a product which is clearly not fit for purpose and frankly brand damaging - I'm losing faith with them. Adobe Acrobat is equally full of bugs and a disaster. Do you suppose they have taken on developers from MS?

[MusicMaxEbb]

I'm constantly getting graphical glitches.  I have to refresh the screen to make them go away. It's really bad and makes Illustrator nearly unusable.

I would also note I really really really really don't like the new bounding box features introduced. You need to zoom in 1000% just to select anything now!

My Specs:

maxOS Sierra

iMac 27 late 2013

Memory 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Graphics Card, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096MB

[rickyw11829465]

After updating to 2017 I cant access the menus as the windows wont open when clicked, and the mouse cursor is permanently flickering with a buffering icon next to it. WTF?

[dylan_dlonte]

Same here... Color blocks showing out of nowhere.. Weird transparency things.. Not cool

[Mr Eslam Samir]

cc 2017 very bad version and have alot of problems in stability it's laggy after 30 min of work 

[pedro.meca]

It's a complete disaster, I'm suffering the same problems, lots of hangs. I suspect that it has to do with the palettes... if you see the task manager you can see there lots of processes working "adobe cep html engine" ... when I open or close a document I can see all the palettes closing one by one (or opening), and it's a lot of time to open or close the program. Also I have problems with complex documents, (hangs for sure) opening from the file explorer, etc... The best way to solve this is using Illustrator 2015. I don't know what's happening in Adobe, but I'm really angry with them, trying Affinity Designer, but this is not a solution, I need Illustrator to make animations in AE and work with photoshop...

[runninghead_design]

Good to see this thread still ranks so highly in searches!
I was considering Updating to 2017.1 but it seems it's not really improved much.

I'm happy to report though that 2015 is still working well
I'd like to put a copy of 2017.1 on my Mac, just for the occasions when I might want it's extra features but it'd overwrite my 2015 and, frankly, I can't be bothered with all that nonsense.

I'd be great if Adobe allowed you to just pick whichever version you want to install from the CC interface, without all the hidden option stuff, without the uncertainty.

That way they could see how many of their customers vote for the more reliable product or the more "improved".

[Larry G. Schneider]

You can install any/all versions of the CC apps/CS apps that you wish. There is an option to not replace existing version when you install a new one.

[runninghead_design]

Could you expand on this please Larry?

I can't see an option to install 2017 as it's the latest, the Install Previous only shows for older apps.

I couldn't see the Keep Existing option either- has it been removed in the CC update?

I returned to this post after an attempt to reinstall AI 2017 entirely for it's Make Pixel Perfect function, having deleted it previously as it was so buggy.