Could a different IP address result in PSE stalling?

[ShelLuser]

Hi gang,

I have a rather annoying issue: every once in a while PSE refuses to start (see attachment). I usually see the splashscreen and then things stall and I can basically wait forever for something to happen. This has happened 3 times in a row so far. The problem also manifests itself with the welcome screen: this one doesn't open either. Resetting the configuration doesn't help because the folder "%APPDATA%\Adobe\Photoshop Elements" gets automatically recreated with a few files, but PSE doesn't start.

So far I managed to resolve this issue by re-installing PSE (so removing & re-installing while keeping my configuration), however this also means that I have to re-activate the software by entering my serial number. So far, so good, but I'm wondering how much longer this will work for me because you can only activate a copy so many times.

Up until now I had no idea what could be causing all this but it just occurred to me that my public IP address is the only difference between last week (when PSE worked normally) and today (when I had to re-install). Well, apart from some Windows 10 update.

So my question: could my dynamic public IP address be causing these kind of issues for me? I'm really hoping to find a solution here because it gets really annoying that I basically have to re-install PSE almost every week in order to continue using it. Today I got home and remembered that I'd better check to see if things still worked but normally I run into these stall issues when I actually need to work on something, which is highly frustrating to say but the least.

Thanks in advance for any ideas or comments!

[Jeff Arola]

Could be the same issue as described here, which has also happened to me using pse 2021 and windows 10 2009.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-elements/launch-of-pse-2021-freezes-at-initialization/td-p/...

[ShelLuser]

Thanks for your quick comment, I appreciate it, and in the mean time I think I finally managed to resolve this issue once and for all!  I've come to conclude that DNS issues can cause PSE to stall during startup. Only PSE, I never had issues with Premiere (Elements, so "PRE").

Yesterday things got a little heated (read: I got seriously annoyed) because only 1 day after I had fully re-installed both PSE and PRE things stalled again, even though I wiped everything except my Organizer library. And as always only PSE caused problems, PRE never had any issues what so ever. I concluded that it was PSE because of the welcome screen, this seems tied into PSE as well because it also stalled (PSE showed a splashscreen, the welcome screen never showed).

Instead of re-installing again I started some diagnostics (I basically checked the tasklist and the effect which some of the Adobe services had), I also made a full network dump for 5 minutes, in which I eventually noticed several repeating DNS requests; even at times when my computer wasn't doing anything special. I traced this back to my DNS settings which are somewhat specific because my home network utilizes a few VPN connections.

And what do you know? After changing 10.0.1.5 to 8.8.8.8 (temporarily) and cleaning the DNS cache ("ipconfig /flushdns" on Windows) things started behaving normally again. In the mean time I've set up a local DNS server (powered by Bind & FreeBSD) and so far, so good. It's a bit ironic that only PSE was having issues while everything else worked normally, but one should not shoot the messenger.

So... when people are having similar issues they might want to verify their DNS. Some internet routers provide DNS relays but that can cause quite some delays which can also result in issues.

For now I'm just happy that I can finally utilize PSE, I'm still very much impressed with software!