Photoshop freezes and stops responding, has to be shut through task menager

[Andrew_Ka]

Hello,

yesterday photoshop stopped working on me out of nowhere after monts of using with no issues. The program starts up normally and works fine for 2-4 minutes. Then it freezes completely every time without warning and stays open in the background, unable to close it, minimalise it or show the desktop. Also if it freezes while using let's say brush tool, the cursor permanently turns into this 'brush circle' cursor where ever I move it (same for other tools). I have to shut it down through task manager (which surprisingly shows the program uses only 30-50 mb of ram during this time, while before the freezes it works normally with around 7 gb of ram).

I reinstalled PS, updated my windows to newest 21H1 build and updated all my drivers, still with no results. Reseting preferences, adding another scratch disk or playing with the performance setting didn't help either.

At first I thought it might be related to working with large files, but the program froze the same way while I had open one of the tutorials. The only solution I can think of now is to reset windows, but that is my last hope.

[Derek Cross]

Have you tried resetting the Photoshop preferences (again!) which you can do under the General tab in Photoshop preferences?

Perhaps uninstalling Photoshop using the Adobe Cleaner Tool and reinstalling it again might sort the issue out.