P: "Adobe Community Help" keeps popping open (Windows)

[Garconis]

Adobe Community Help keeps popping open when working within Adobe Photoshop CS5. I'm not sure if I'm doing some sort of shortcut that causes it to open, but sometimes (maybe once instance, during a 40hr week) Adobe Community Help will open in a Window while I am doing stuff in Adobe Photoshop CS5.

I'm not sure what causes it, but I'll close the Community Help window, and then continue working in Photoshop, and it will open again. Only way to keep it from opening back up again is to close and restart Photoshop. This has happened to me on my home PC as well, and in previous versions of Photoshop, if I remember correctly. I am using Windows 7 now, but I think I've had this happen on XP too.

Is it because there are updates available? Is it because I'm doing some sort of weird shortcut that I don't know about?

An example: I was transforming an object (using the mouse, clicking, using shift button while moving the cursor, using the space bar while panning, etc.) It just opened again. Guess it's time to restart Photoshop...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Anna - we use Photoshop in addition to writing it. We will put in a week's work without restarting, and test on dirty machines as well as clean. We test as close to real world usage as we can. But we don't install every single utility and other applications that you may have on your system (that would be impossible because of the number of permutations).

And yet, we still don't see this problem.

Again, there is most likely something different about your systems that causes this.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Clean == wipe the disk, install the OS, install the application, don't change any settings, don't add any drivers/fonts/plugins or anything else, then launch the application.

No, we have no reports of this happening on Macintosh.

[happybana0]

That's good to know. Thanks, that is a much more clear description of what you guys are doing, may help us figure out the difference...What about common programs like Office? Do you have the whole Adobe Suite installed or just Photoshop? I know for a fact that this has been happening to me since I had nothing but the Manufacturer (HP)'s Windows 7, Office, and Synology Assistant installed. (I recently did a complete system restore from the backup partition, which I have in no way altered, after trying Windows 8 and the problem continued through both OS versions)

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Some people test on systems with office and the suite installed. Others test on more minimal systems. And some test on home machines with all sorts of stuff installed, upgraded, etc.

[Garconis]

You should send out a corporate wide email within Adobe and ask if any users have had the issue. I'm sure SOMEONE in-house has had the issue. If not, that's just very strange.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

We've pretty much done that (nobody said they'd seen it). And we've done customer visits to people who say they can reproduce the problem (it didn't happen).
Now Jeff has been trying to get disk images from affected customers so we can reproduce the environment on our own machines.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I experience this issue at times in every version of Photoshop I have used, including 7. On every computer. I think it is an intentional "feature". Disconnecting the internet, or blocking Photoshop from accessing the internet, is the only way I know of to prevent it. When the help box randomly pops up, I'm thinking Photoshop is trying to send information via the internet.

[Garconis]

I was wondering about this, and it sounds accurate. I have a PC workstation at home that is not connected to the internet that I often use for Photoshop work. I have never had this issue on that PC even though it has a similar build to my employer's PC. Since I use my employer's PC more often for Photoshop work, I figured that was the reason I see it on a weekly basis. Perhaps I will have to update my host file to see if it stops causing the issue.

But the reasoning behind it still leaves questioning. Is it because Adobe is "secretly" checking to make sure the program is valid during certain uses? Or is the fact that there's an internet connection what just allows the popup to show, even though something else entirely is still triggering it? (i.e., if we disconnect the internet, is it still being triggered and not shown? or does it stop the trigger entirely?)

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

This is certainly not a feature, or anything we designed.
But we'd still like to know what outside factor is causing it for some people.

[LarryM01]

Obviously:
Since the popping up Help pages are displayed in your browser, it's something that happens between Photoshop and your browser.

1. Does this happen with a specific browser only?
1a: Does it never happen with a specific browser?
2. Is it the same Help page (eg Start: Help and Tutorials) that shows for all?
3. Or is it a Help page that you might have recently used?
4. Does disconnecting from Internet remove the symptoms at least?
5. What triggers the popping up? Activating any or a specific Photoshop command?
Using the mouse or a keyboard command? Closing a popped up Help page?
Anything else?
6. How many times have you experienced this problem?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

From what we can tell, it's something that messed up event handling inside Photoshop, so that the wrong window/receiver gets events (and yet, we can't reproduce such a problem). Perhaps something that modifies keyboard input, or something that draws an alternate UI.

[Garconis]

Happened within 2 hours of work today. Time to edit that hosts file.

[happybana0]

Can that still be done? I thought CC stopped that from working.

[Garconis]

I'm not on CC (yet).

[happybana0]

Jealous. If I could turn back time, I would go back to CS5 and never ever upgrade. I used to be able to fix this issue with the host file workaround.

[PECourtejoie]

chris, an user reported this error message when several help windows popped up:
"Color Picker (Stop Color)

There was an error initializing the Adobe Help application. You may need to re-install the application and the Help component.

(7)
"
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/128684...
Hope this helps.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Yeah, it acts like someone asked for help in the context of the color picker, but they didn't. And we still don't know what causes it or how to reproduce it.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I am on Windows 7 using CS4 and this time it was when I chose the Character type tool. What's funny is I used it already and this didn't happen.

[Jeff-Adobe]

Hi everyone,

This is Jeff Sass one of the Photoshop Engineering Managers.

First, I wanted to apologize how long this bug has been in Photoshop. It was quite challenging to reproduce and we have been trying for a long time.

Second, I wanted to share the good news that we have been able to reproduce this bug in house with our automation system and have a fix for this issue that will be released in a future version of Photoshop. This fix is a Windows only fix (we haven't seen any reports of this happening on the Mac). This will resolve the issue where the Adobe help is launched in your default web browser when you are using Photoshop especially in dialog boxes (like Color Picker, or Layer Style). This issue had nothing to do with external plugins and can be reproduced with a default install of Photoshop. You just need to do a certain internal operation 3999 times before it shows up.

Third, thank you to everyone that has come to the forums to post about this issue. We take customer feedback very seriously and appreciate all of the feedback we received on this issue to help us finally narrow it down.

Thanks - Jeff

[happybana0]

This is the best news ever...especially since today I had the worst instance in a few years of this happening. It was launching 4 or 5 help windows at a time whenever I Alt+Tabbed back to Photoshop. Took some gamerific timing to get that Color picker closed and save my work... So glad this finally got figured out! Great work.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

So it wasn't an outside factor like we thought, but a time + type of operations done + magic numbers problem. I am SOOO glad they found the cause...

[Garconis]

Thanks Adobe, for finally admitting it was your fault! Haha. By the way, by disconnecting my internet while using Photoshop, I was no longer having this issue. Not sure if that had anything to do with it. Would be curious for a good explanation of what true culprit(s) was/were...any how it took numerous years for them to find it. But none the less, just glad my biggest gripe can now move to another topic. 😉

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

The biggest problem was the lack of a reproducible case. When we expanded some of our automation tests, we suddenly had a reproducible case.
As for the nature of the problem - eh, that's kind of buried in the details of Windows resource management plus the application code. It wasn't obvious, as several senior engineers had already spent weeks looking for possible causes. I even spent a lot of time looking for the cause and came up empty, and our windows API experts spent even more time on it...
We just had to find a way to reproduce the problem reliably, then we could track it back to the cause.

[anthonyd7463498]

Will the fix be released as an update or in the next full version release? Do you have a potential release date for the fix?

[Jeff-Adobe]

Hi Anthony,

I cannot say when it will be released but the fix has been checked in and verified already so it shouldn't be too long. I know everyone is anxious for it given how long it has been.

Thanks,
Jeff