Photoshop 2022 Freezes Unexpectedly on Windows 10

[Ken Curtis]

The program randomly hangs and does not respond to keystrokes or mouse clicks. No other program on my Windows 10 computer with 32 GB Ram has this problem including Bridge and Camera Raw. The freeze can happen anytime; it does not matter what operation I perform or whether I am using a smart object, adjustment layer or saving. The program randomly freezes. I use Windows Task Manager to end the task. I followed all the advice I could find about checking my graphics card compatibility, allocating more memory, starting the program without the filters loaded, etc, etc and none of those solutions solved the problem.

I may have found something that will helps. Go to Preferences > File Handling. I had the Automatically Save Recovery Information checked and I had it set to save every 10 minutes. I changed the setting to every 1 hour, and the problem did not re-occurred. Usually, for my work, I manually save my file after having done a lot of work, and that usually happens in less than one hour. I then went back and unchecked the Automatically Save Recovery checkbox. After doing that, I exited the program, and then restarted the program. The freeze has not reoccurred. If this change does stop the problem, it probably means that there is a bug in the code that does the automatic backup.

[jamesnmcdonald]

I am having a similar problem.  Occurs consistently when I try to resize an image.  Photoshop locks up and then a few minutes later I get "Device Power State Failure" Blue Screen and Windows reboots.

[Ken Curtis]

I am the original poster of this thread. Photoshop continues to freeze unexpectedly. Here is some more information for your software developers to look into. Firstly, immediately after a freeze, I sometimes find a 0-byte file with a name like psNNNN.tmp in the same folder where I am working. Secondly, once PS freezes, it seems to do so again and again, and often while performing the exact same operation, such as file save, crop or select. (Those are typical, but the freeze can happen while I am doing anything.) The only way I can prevent the freezing is to shut down the computer (not restart, but full shut down), and hope that PS won't freeze up. As I have stated before, I used to do programming. The more I think about what is happening involves a problem with semaphores. Of course I have no way of knowing, but it seems like a "deadly embrace" or some process is holding onto the semaphore and so PS hangs. Since this does not happen with any other program I use, it is most likely a PS issue. When the freeze occurs, the only way to do anything is to use Task Manager to end the program. Absolutely nothing will re-enable the program to run. If you switch to another program (a mail program for example) and then click on a PS window or use Windows Alt - Tab to switch active windows, you can not make PS an active window again. Possibly PS is using 16-bit handles for semaphores and Windows needs 32-bit handles, or vice-versa. I hope this helps. @DanielPresedo (I assume the @ symbol notifies the specific user.) Ken

[kian22920255falv]

@Daniel Presedo @PECourtejoie  just trying to do the @ symbol ken wanted to use

[AndreiL]

Ken, I'm having the same issue. It's been one month since your last post, have you found any way to fix the freezing, by any chance? 

[Ken Curtis]

Hello Andreil.

The problem seems to have disappeard, at least for now. I have done a number of things to my computer to clean registry errors to removing temp files. I use a program called JV16 Power Tools to remove registry errors and usless keys and it also removes what it believes are empty and not required as well as some of the Windows log files. I recently discovered that there were well over 1000 log files, doing nothing and taking up space on my hard drive (my opinion). These were located in temp and tmp folders. You can find where these folders are located by doing this. Go to TaskBar Start (Windows Flag icon), and in the search for a setting, type "Edit the system environment variables". When that window displays, click the Advanced Tab and then click on the Environment Variables button. I manually went through each of the folders in those temp directories and deleted all of the log files that were older than the current date. Sometimes, the system may not allow you to do that because they are being used, and in that case, I just skipped them. Another thing that happened was Photoshop continued to run after I exited the program. I saw this in Task Manager. Go here to read post: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-bugs/photoshop-continues-to-run-after-exiting-pro...

Hope this helps you.

[AndreiL]

Thanks Ken, I'll give JV16 a try. I normally use CC Cleaner for PC maintenance, including reg cleaning, but I never thought checking on log files. Let's see what happens.

[Christo23611820l2b5]

Possible solution, After I treid everyting, I run a disc cleanup and remove the tempary files and the freezing stops, lets hope it will stay like that. Make sure you select remove tempary files.

[Ken Curtis]

I agree. I forgot to mention tempory files and log files.

[rudo]

Photoshop is becoming more unusable with every coming year...

[Guillaume Gagnon]

Hello there, just bought the Photoshop 2022 a few days ago.  On windows 10, the program freezes constantly whatever I do.  I do have to shut down Photoshop with the task manager.  As I read every thing here about this, is there any solutions to date?

[Freedom263823254qf1]

@Guillaume Gagnon i m also having the same issue brother, did you solve it?