Running Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 in Windows 10

Question

I am having trouble running my Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 on my new laptop. When I purchased Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 I was running it on Windows Vista Home Premium, but have since upgraded to Windows 10. I installed Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 on my new laptop and have had nothing but trouble. I was at first able to run the program and access my Catalogue through running the Trouble Shooter and selecting Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (or 3). However, since yesterday I can no longer access my program. If I try to open the Edit and Enhance Photos feature, the program freezes up on launch (where it says reading preferences)  and does not open. If I try to open View and Organize Photos, the program also freezes and says that it failed to launch the Catalogue. Several people told me to uninstall the Adobe program from my computer and re-install it. However, after having done so I am still having the same problems. Can you provide me with more assistance? At this time I have uninstalled Adobe from my computer again and am waiting to do a fresh install with some guidance.P.S. I am not very computer savvy, so a step-by-step process would be very much appreciated.

Merial Neider · Answer

Three and a half years late to the question and maybe this will only help a few people, but here's a bat file that will allow you to launch Photoshop every time on Win 10:

DEL "%appdata%\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\5.0\Editor\Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 Prefs.psp"
start "Photoshop E5" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 5.0\Photoshop Elements 5.0.exe" %1

Open Notepad, paste the code, save as "PSLaunch.bat" instead of a ".txt", and if you want to make life extra easy, redirect your photoshop shortcut to the file. Please note, that this assumes you used the default install directory, if you installed it elsewhere, you will need to change the directory.

This code deletes the preferences file which seems to be the issue on Win 10 (and unfortuanately where all the settings are saved, so every launch the settings will be reset) and allows it to properly launch on Windows 10. Kind of a crappy work around but it works every time as of Win 10 20H2

** A note on Open With>Photoshop or directly opening *.psd (photoshop) files**

This will only work if Photoshop is already open, otherwise it will get stuck on the loading screen again. If this happens, close it, launch Photoshop from the bat file and reopen the file.

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