Photoshop CC freezes on "Reading Preferences"

Old thread, but it comes up as one of the first Google results so I wanted to share what worked for me, in case anyone is searching for this problem still in 2023. The actual fix is at the end but the other info may help.

It seems like there are a few different causes and fixes. The commonly suggested fix is resetting preferences. You can also have brushes, styles, and patterns that are saved in files that are either huge or get corrupted. So, if you can live without that stuff, it may help to delete the PSP files associated with them and let photoshop recreate them. You can also manually delete a bunch of these things within the photoshop GUI.

None of those things worked, and I realized that because I'm on a work domain, my Photoshop preferences (and maybe even the program files) are redirected elsewhere... So it looks like I'm installing to my own PC but in the background, a lot of the files are stored on some network server. I theorized that there was a permissions problem accessing the PS settings file because it wasn't on my computer. I found a registry entry that lets you force photoshop to put settings in whatever folder you want, so I changed that setting to point to a path on my computer, as opposed to on the domain server. The registry entry will look something like: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Photoshop\170.0 (the last number is your version number, 170 is photoshop 2023). From there, you can edit the entry called "SettingsFilePath" and put in path to your settings folder. Do it without quotes, and with a trailing backslash. For example on a typical home PC it would default to C:\Users\[your user name]\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2023\Adobe Photoshop 2023 Settings\

This seemed to help, but for some reason stopped working, and I realized that it wasn't really an issue having to read about 20 MB of preferences from our domain server.

The fix that worked might sound like lame generic advice, and it's the kind of thing that rarely fixes ANY problem for me, and I do a fair amount of IT work. But in this, the solution wasn't some obscure registry entry, or group policy entry, or taking ownership of some folder and changing inherited permissions, or logging in/running as an admin. The solution was - just do a full windows update.

I didn't have to go as far as upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11. But I did keep doing updates until microsoft had no more suggestiosn. And even then, I noticed that my Windows did not upgrade to 22H2 (the latest/last version of windows 10, I believe). It was stuck at 21H2. So I downloaded the windows update assistant, which skips all the manual hassle of installing MSU and MSI files, or even refreshing the windows update dialogue. You just run it, sit back, and wait, and it does whatever is needed to get you upt o 22H2. The assistant is explained here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/windows-10-update-assistant-3550dfb2-a015-7765-12ea-fba2ac36fb3f

The actual updater program to 22h2 is the first big blue download button at the top of this page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Doing this reset my registry tweak so that the settings file went back to living on the domain server. And it probably also changed some other obscure settings. Whatever the reason, it solved the problem for me, and now photoshop launches quickly.