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...

[Garconis]

Just happened AGAIN. I was editing a drop shadow on some text and it popped open. I closed it, and didn't even move the mouse -- and it kept reopening.

[Noel Carboni]

Save your work ASAP and close and restart Photoshop.

-Noel

[Garconis]

Yeah, I've gotten used to having to do that.

[PECourtejoie]

(Hello, Mark, nice to "see" you!)
FYI I remember from the user to user forum that the issue happened in way older version of Photoshop (pre community help, Look at this thread from another forum in 2005: http://www.photoshopgurus.com/forum/p...)
But I think most of the cases were on the Windows platform.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Adobe Help Community popup window opens when holding down Ctrl and using the mouse to resize an object. I'm seeing that holding down keyboard buttons for an extended period of time and doing some other action causes this window to open.

CS5
Windows 7
Intuos 3 installed (but not used within this scenario)

[PECourtejoie]

Mark, here are other current cases about the issue, (especially for troubleshooting) I could contact the users if needed for them to post here, or you could join there: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3506399

This site reposts old discussions of the U2U, also point to low resources: http://www.clearps.com/photoshop-foru...

[Jakob_Kramer]

Hi,
Just to write that we're discussing the problem in the thread PECourtejoie linked to earlier ( http://forums.adobe.com/message/3506399 ).

This has happened to me ever since I was using Photoshop 4, and I have encountered it on Photoshop 6, Photoshop 7 and Photoshop CS (which I'm currently using). To be specific: On every single version of Photoshop that I have ever used.

During that time, I have been using two different computers using Win XP and two different computers using Win7. Lately I have installed a Wacom Intuous 4 tablet, but the problem was there before as well.

It ALWAYS (without exception) happens when I use the colour picker tool. I can work for different amounts of time (half an hour, 2 hours or so) and at some point when I open the colour picker, a lot of help windows will open. Sometimes one or two, sometimes 25.

At this point Photoshop displays three different kinds of behaviour:
1. Either it crashes,
2. or it keeps opening help windows whenever i minimize or close the windows already open and click on the photoshop tab to go to this window,
3. or it is possible to continue working as if nothing has happened. No other windows open and it is possible to keep working. Somtimes another bug appears after some time, though (making it impossible to save), so I usually restart Photoshop no matter what behaviour it displays.

I have tried removing the F1 shourtcut to the Help page, thinking that perhaps a memory overflow was triggering a F1 keystroke in some way. This didn't solve the problem though, as the help page keeps popping up, whether a shoutcut has been assigned or not.

As this has happened on so many computers, different operating systems and configurations as well as different versions of Photoshop, I think the problem is connected to the Photoshop program itself and not to third party programs etc. I have no technical knowledge to back this up though, only intuition :)

Let me know if you need more details.

Greetings from Denmark!
Jakob Kramer

[PECourtejoie]

Tak, Jakob for the added information!

[_mark3]

Thanks muchly everyone for those details. We didn't realize how far back in time this problem extended. We've used a lot of different Help systems during that timeframe, which suggests that the Help app itself is not the root of the problem. And as far as I know, the issue doesn't occur with any Adobe products other than Photoshop.

I'll relay all the related forum threads to the Photoshop team for closer scrutiny. Could take them a while to determine the fix--this has been a real puzzle! But please post any additional details that occur to you.

[Noel Carboni]

This is probably nothing you haven't already thought of...

I'd suggest you look to the data structures that govern the operation of your event loop, specifically in the area of F1 key (or other Help-invoking event) handling and event queue management.

Understand that when the problem happens it tends to bring up multiple copies of the Help tool, as a result of trying to do other things, implying a persistent change of one or more variables that somehow cause the event loop to mistakenly think that an event is an F1 keypress (or similar).

I don't know if it's related, but I have occasionally seen also (in older versions of PS; fortunately not in CS5) cases where the event dequeing gets skewed by a few steps - i.e., mouse operations cause something to happen right now, but the something itself is from several clicks ago. It has the feeling of Photoshop lagging behind, but it's not a lag in time but by mouse click.

As I mentioned above, I suspect bugs elsewhere (e.g., in the display driver) corrupting memory as the root cause of these sorts of things, but changes to make event loop operations more robust could certainly make Photoshop more defensive against such problems.

-Noel

[brian-j]

I'm happy to see Adobe is working on this issue. I experience this problem in CS4 on a regular basis and have had the same issue on older versions of Photoshop as well -- although I don't remember on which version I started experiencing it.

Adobe Community Help opens in my web browser periodically when I'm working with layer styles. When the problem occurs, sometimes I can just close help in the browser window and continue working in Photoshop. Other times I get caught in an inescapable loop -- I can't close layer styles and every click in Photoshop opens another instance of help in my browser... I have to force quite Photoshop.

I've had this issue with different PCs and different Windows OS. I do not have a Wacom tablet. Here's what my current PC is:

Dell Studio XPS 9100
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7, 930@2.80GHZ
9 GB RAM
Windows 7 64-bit

Hope Adobe is successful getting to the bottom of this one!

Brian

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

This was almost a daily occurrence for me. I have narrowed down the events on which this 'glitch' happens.

Excessive of 2 hours use, the help window opens. It will open itself even if you don't touch Photoshop at all.
It is more prone to open based on the following user interactions:

- Use of the Layer Style Menu. (high chance)
- Use of the Shapes menu on right click in the doc.

I have found a way to 'slow' the amount of times it likes to pop up.
I disabled all start-up services excluding the Switchboard (SBSV).
I don't see it as often as I used to. But it still happens.
Dreamweaver does not do this. Only Photoshop. Very odd.
If I ignore it and continue working, after about 3 to 5 pop-ups, Ps will crash.
I have a Windows XP desktop I still own and it has Ps CS3 on it. Never had this problem.
_____________________________________

Installed Programs:
- Firefox 8.0
- Ps CS5.1 (Std)
- Dw CS5.5
- Office 2010 Student
- NAV 2012
- iTunes
- Bandicam
- Fontlab Studio 5
- Visual Studio 2010 Pro

Computer:
Gateway NV55S13u
Win 7 Ultimate (Upgrade)
1.5GHz AMD A8 quad core
6GB RAM

Hopefully you guys can solve this. Other than this, I have no complaints. I have actually learned to deal with it.

[J453]

Styro,

Can you try something? Go to File>Scripts>Script Events Manager...

Is "Enable Events to run Scripts/Actions" enabled?

[Garconis]

FYI - I just checked and I don't have that enabled. Also, the only programs that I have installed, that he also does, is Firefox, MS Office (Enterprise 2007), and obviously Photoshop (12.0.4 x64).

[J453]

OK. Thanks. It was a shot in the dark since this has been so elusive.

[Noel Carboni]

Funny thing... Just last night I had this happen once.

I was working on a pretty complex set of Layer Styles, and I got into a situation where the screen stopped updating when I was making changes to settings (but would still update when I hit OK to commit the layer style changes).

At one point Help popped up without my asking it to. Upon closing it I found it didn't come back up, but I finished my Photoshop work and closed Photoshop not long thereafter.

For what it's worth, [ ] Enable Events to Run Scripts/Actions is NOT enabled for me either.

-Noel

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I have enabled this feature.

I'm going to guess that the script I am supposed to use is "Clean Listener".

[J453]

No. I think it's a red herring since the other users don't have "Enable Events to run Scripts/Actions" enabled.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I have tried something new today.

I have enabled system logging, I also changed the location of my dump files to a folder on my desktop.

I have done this because, yesterday I opened the default dump folder and watched as every time I closed Adobe Help, a .dmp file was created. This struck me as very odd. 4 help dumps @ 2mb each. Ps dumb was 5mb. With Visual Studio Pro I was given dev tools. With that install came an executable file titled "dumpchk.exe."

For those who want this tool, you can get it here. The download you want is titled "Developing for Windows Vista or Previous Versions of Windows". This is incorrect. They made a mistake. Upon clicking the page, it actually says Windows 7. You will need Frame work 4.

For those who want to know how to enable system logging, click here. Please make sure you know what you are doing.
How to read a dump (.dmp) file.

Back to my older XP computer, I have managed to update and get it going again. I found that there were over 2,000 dump files titled Adobe Help. Yet I never had Adobe Help open on me. I only used it maybe 3 times. This is very strange. I will look into these and report back.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Adobe Help.exe.(various numbers).dmp

Process Name: Adobe Help.exe : C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help\Adobe Help.exe
Process Architecture: x64
Exception Code: 0xC0000005
Exception Information: The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access.
Heap Information: Not Present
_____________________________________________

The error/exception code is one I have seen plenty of times.
Do the following:

Check you RAM modules. This will be very important. Corrupt or faulty ones will cause this kind of error code to show in a dump. Kingston RAM is notorious for having issues. I used to have this brand. After lengthy research and many system tests, they suck. I quit having as many issues. Windows help on how to check RAM.

Check your installation. Even though the Adobe Installer says it was successful, check again.
Turn off ALL start-up processes and services. Less interference. During my install I only had 47 (48 if you include the installer). Try uninstalling Adobe products on your machine and try again. Uninstall will not remove everything it created/installed. For me to tell you how to do that would break Adobe's policy. (Not a hacker. Just a smart developer who knows how software works.)

On the XP OS computer, I repaired Photoshop. Guess what... Adobe Help started popping up. My broken/corrupt install was keeping it from popping up, but creating dump files. The dumb files also show the same error/exception code from Ps CS3 on XP.

My system log also reports that there is an error from help even on a manual user open.

Seems to me like Adobe Help is broken??...

Either it gets broken from the installer or from the process that tries to access the RAM.

[Noel Carboni]

Just as a side note - my RAM modules are not suspect. I have ECC RAM and the system will halt if an uncorrectable error is detected.

-Noel

[Guest]

Hello ,

Any news about this particular issue? We have a user here using win7 x64 with a Intuos4 and Photoshop CS5 having an issue where the community help (adobe bridge) will keep opening randomly even if the user doesn't press anything.

For now I disabled the keyboard shortcuts and while the issue seems to happen less frequently it still pops ups every now and then.

If you need any more info/troubleshooting from my part please let me know, thanks!

[Guest]

Any news on this particular case by any chance?

[Guest]

Hello,

I have a user here that reported that her Adobe community help kept opening (through adobe bridge) while working on her photoshop. It started happening randomly one day and won't stop.

I've removed the keyboard shortcut in case this was the issue but it keeps happening, less frequent now thought from what she told me.

I've seen in a past thread that this issue was happening in the Adobe office too, with people using a Wacom tablet which is exactly the case here, the user got a Intuos 4 tablet.This is happening even while she's not on her computer.

From what I've saw, the Intuos 4 driver was updated by Wacom 2 months ago (september) and they fixed an issue with the pen pressure in CS5, could that be the cause? I could probably try to install an old driver and see how it goes. What do you think?

Thanks

[_mark3]

Installing the old Wacom driver would be a worthwhile test. Give it a shot and let us know what you learn.

We really want to solve this problem for customers but have had trouble reliably reproducing it.