P: Welcome screen freezes and won't go away

[hellopaul4]

Much like, many, many other Photoshop CC users, if I load Photoshop directly (as opposed to double-clicking a PSD file), the stupid welcome screen (well, a blank, white window) appears and will not go away. I have read that if you wait around 20 minutes, stuff will appear, including a 'don't show this stupid screen and crash my computer ever again' option box.

I'm a fully paid up CC subscriber and I'm running 2014.2.1 release. PLEASE fix this, surely it's a 5 minute job to make that stupid window go away and never come back! Come on, this hang is the first thing a Photoshop user experiences when they load it up. It does not inspire much confidence in what's supposed to be a pro-level piece of software.

I've been using Photoshop professionally since VERSION 1 and do not need to be told, by a crashy welcome screen, how to use it.

I do know that over the past few versions, it's become progressively less stable - and more bloated with silly features. PLEASE fix this!

[J453]

What OS/version are you on?

[hellopaul4]

OS:
Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit.

Hardware:
Intel i7-3960X
64GB RAM

[J453]

Couple of things. We've seen issues with anti-virus. If you temporarily disable your anti-virus, does PS launch and the Welcome screen populate correctly?

The other thing we've seen cause this are file names/paths in the File>Recent> menu cause problems. If you clear this menu item, does it load properly? (restoring prefs on launch would clear out the 'recents' menu item. http://blogs.adobe.com/crawlspace/201...

[hellopaul4]

Aha! I tried disabling my virus protection (AVG free edition) but it made no difference - I loaded PS but it just hung on the blank white Welcome screen. I did a ctrl-alt-delete to kill it.

I then loaded up a PSD document then cleared the recent items, then quit PS, then reloaded PS, and it's loaded up OK! Welcome screen appeared, I closed it, and created a new document. All's good.

Could the problem be that I often load images from a NAS drive, which is currently not mounted? Maybe PS is trying to locate them or something. Maybe.

[J453]

It's more likely a character in that path that's hanging things up. You can disable the dialog from showing up on launch by going to the "New Features" tab of the Welcome screen and scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Do Not Show Again" - if you want to re-access the dialog, go to Help>Welcome.

We're working on a fix for the recent items issue.

[hellopaul4]

Thanks for your help and quick replies on this! I love Photoshop, and have used it almost daily for most of my career. It disappoints me to see cracks appear in this previously rock-solid software.

[Frigo5]

Yosemite

[tleitao]

I have the same issue with using a NAS drive. As soon as I cleared the recent items everything worked fine. I think this has to do with NAS file names. You might want to check how photoshop is handling \\, \, and NAS Drive names because otherwise my file names are nothing more than alpha-numeric. This only happened to me today and nothing has changed on my system since yesterday in terms of Security and Firewall.

[J453]

Are you still having this issue today with Photoshop CC 2014.2.1? The engineers thought this file naming issue was fixed with a recent server change.

[J453]

See this document with for how to troubleshoot Welcome Screen in Photoshop:

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/t...

[hellopaul4]

That's interesting! I just loaded up Photoshop to check which version it is, and lo and behold, I've been presented with a blank, stubborn welcome screen. Yesterday I used Photoshop to edit one image on a NAS, which is now disconnected.

Right - I've force-quitted Photoshop and loaded up an image. It's version 2014.2.1, so no, it was not fixed by the recent server change.

I'll clear the recent items list - amongst the 20 files is ONE from the (disconnected) NAS. And I've switched off the Welcome screen.

[tleitao]

Yes I am on the latest version. This is definitely a bug that needs to be fixed at some point. This does not happen in Illustrator for me.

[J453]

Hmm. OK, let me rope in the engineers who worked on this issue.

[tleitao]

BTW - Not a show stopper bug because there is an obvious workaround. Just a bit of a pain.

[J453]

Yeah. No doubt. Mark and his engineering team may need more info, so if you can keep track of the file names/paths that cause a failure, we can try and fix this.

[tleitao]

Let me know what info you need to reproduce the bug and I will happily supply.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Recent files on an unmounted network drive display incorrectly on the Welcome Screen, and when clicked, the welcome screen closes, but nothing opens. No error message occurs.

Mounting the network drive and re-opening the Welcome screen all displays and works as expected.

The 'stepped icons' in the screenshot are ones on the unmounted network drive, and appear without a filename. This seems to break the layout.

The icons with a filename next to them are local files.



Using Photoshop 2014.2.1 on Mac OS X 10.9.5

[J453]

We're working on fixing the rest of the issues recently found with unmounted drives and recent files list.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Thanks for the reply - pleased to hear it.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I just updated my photoshop from cc to cc 2014 and when I started it, it went to the new home screen but shows no content and freezes. I uninstalled and reinstalled the software but still does it installed all new updates and still no use.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Welcome screen that's opens with the programme inviting you to "Tri It" disables the computer from performing any function at all.
It needs to be removed! We have work flow and do not need a recently purchased programme to interfere with that flow. This is a bad idea.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Open Photoshop CC 2014 but crashes* when loading "welcome" window.
But open Photoshop from file - it works fine.
But then again. Once Photoshop is open, I click on Help>Welcome - it crashes*.

* Photoshop freezes.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Welcome dialog frozen when I open Photoshop in Windows 8

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I use windows 7 and had all of these issues as well but as soon as I disabled the start window all my problems went away.

[J453]

Should be fixed in the 2014.2.2 update. Choose Help>Updates... to install.