CS2 problem: windows disappear or are always on top / overlap other programs

Hmm, apperently I have none of the mentioned updates (Win7 Ultimate SP1), also tried the hex patch and nothing has changed.

The fastest way to replicate:

• Grab like 5-10 images and drop them into your PS
• When PS starts opening your files, immediately click on another window, so the files are still opening in the background
• Once done, go into your photoshop and it should bug out (tried it as I'm typing this post right now)

The point is, I would like someone to try replicating these steps, who had some of the mentioned solutions working for them.

Maybe it's not a big of a deal, but sometimes it gets annoying. To make it a bit less annoying, I had to disable window minimize/maximize animation and get used to minimizing photoshop by clicking it on the taskbar (or a shortcut, Alt + Space -> N).

Not sure if uninstalling most of the windows updates is a good idea - most likely, not.

Hi, not sure if anyone is still looking for a solution, but I will post the fix here that I recently found, just in case.

As other people already figured out, there is indeed a conflict between Photoshop CS2 and win32k.sys since the Windows 7 April 2016 update and is still present in the latest updates.

After a lot of debugging, I discovered that the culprit is a call to the SetWindowPos function, which is supposed to bring the toolbars to the top of the Z-order. If this call is skipped, everything seems to work as it should, without any side effects as far as I can tell.

So, to fix it, you need to do a small patch in the Photoshop.exe. Don't be afraid, all you need is a hex editor and some common sense. There are many hex editors available (do a simple Google search) but I would recommend 'frhed' since it's free and easy to use.

1. Locate the Photoshop.exe - usually in "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop CS2" if you have a 32-bit Windows, or "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Photoshop CS2" if you have a 64-bit Windows.

2. Make a backup of Photoshop.exe in case something goes wrong.

3. Start your hex editor with admin rights because it will change files in the "Program Files" folder.

4. Open Photoshop.exe

5. Locate the following byte pattern: 75 6F 6A 13 50 50 50 50 50

6. Change the byte 75 to EB. Make sure to overwrite the byte, not to insert it.

7. Save your changes.

8. Enjoy a properly working Photoshop CS2 on Windows 7.

Good luck!

Here's something that worked for me (CS2, Win 7 32bit). I didn't want to mess with the Windows Update thingy, or the memory tweaks that were mentioned earlier.

I turned on a second Scratch Disk:

>> Photoshop

>> Edit

>> Preferences

>> Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks...

>> First = Startup

>> Second = C:\ (previously was None)

>> Restart Photoshop

So far, so good. I just finished a hour session on Photoshop, and all was back to normal. It used to crap out in about 5 minutes. I also closed all other programs during the session. Good luck...

OK, we may have found a workaround. It's not perfect but it seems to work. When editing an image in Photoshop CS2 click View > Screen Mode and select either 'Full Screen Mode With Menu Bar' or 'Full Screen Mode' (or press the 'F' key to cycle modes). Once in Full Screen Mode Photoshop CS2 seems to work perfectly (If you have multiple images open you need to set the screen mode for each of them and switch images using the Window menu). To switch to another application you need to change Photoshop back to 'Standard Screen Mode' and then Minimize Photoshop to stop palettes appearing over other applications. We've been using this method for over a week now and had no problems with Photoshop. The plus side is you get more workspace :-)

We've now tested Photoshop CS2 on a new system running Windows 7 Professional SP1 (32-bit) but with an AMD Radeon HD3400 graphics card and it ran 'almost' perfectly compared to the many problems we have running it on the nVidia systems, suggesting that the problem may be a combination of Microsoft's new Win32K.sys file and the graphics card driver (I'd like more info from people who are experiencing the disappearing/overlaying palettes/dialog boxes to see if certain graphics cards are better or worse than others).

I've also tested Photoshop 7 on both systems and have yet to have any problems. Luckily we only use Photoshop for web graphics and application icons/images so Photoshop 7 does everything we need (we can always switch to Photoshop CS2 if we find something we can't do in PS7 and then switch back. BTW: Photoshop 7 and Photoshop CS2 install and work fine side-by-side but you can only run one at a time).

For those who keep suggesting we should give up on CS2 and buy CC instead I'd like to point out that as a small business with legitimate licenses for 6 copies of Photoshop, 3 copies of Premiere, 2 copies of Illustrator, 2 copies of After Effects as well as licences for Audition, Flash, DVD Encore etc., that has cost us thousands of pounds and enables us to carry out all our workloads on our many Windows 7 computer systems, we are NOT prepared to pay Adobe over £400 per month (inc VAT) for 6x Creative Cloud licenses (not including the cost of having to upgrade all our computer systems to enable the new versions to run).

I think you will find things like this are bound to happen when you use an OS which is supported like Windows 7 that receives updates and you use an application that is not support like old versions of Photoshop.  Some day Microsoft will drop support for Windows7 and windows 8.  Only Windows 10 will be supported.  Adobe drops support of an application version when they release a new version of an application even if the new version has major problems.  Adobe dropped support for CS2 10 years ago.  Windows XP was the windows version at that and Microsoft not longer supports Windows XP......

what is everyone doing now that the updates are being packaged and cant be selected individually?

Also does CS3 version have the same issues has anybody tested it?

The problem is win32k.sys, which has been changed for security reasons by MS. I have tried, other suggested workarounds, memory etc. with no luck. The solution was to restore older version of win32k.sys, from backup I keep, so it seems, there's no need to roll back on complete updates, just restore win32k.sys after updating. Not something to recommend to everyone, but it works for me.

I know this is old, but I'm apparently REALLY behind on updates so I only just ran into this problem today. After trying to work on PS around the annoying problem I finally couldn't take it anymore and took to the internet to find out if it was just me. I wasn't a big fan of the solutions on here so I kept looking to see if anyone had figured out an alternative and found another one here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4esxz7/psa_for_windows_7_pro_adobe_cs2_users_after_april/#bottom-comments ​

It's a pretty simple change to the PS settings.xml file that they say got disrupted in the updates. I saved a copy of my old settings.xml just in case it screwed things up even more or I wanted some of the old info back, but so far everything seems to perfect and I got to keep all the updates as well (which I will now make sure are applied on a more regular basis!). If that changes I will definitely come back and say so, but this might be an easy fix that allows the updates to stay.

It's update time again...

the problem is, this time I cannot uninstall the update I think might be responsible (KB3177467) When I rightklick, no "Uninstall" window opens. Nothing happens. Anyone has a solution or knows if this is the problematic update this time? :/