Illustrator CS won't start 1

[mugs82]

Greetings. One of my users is running an iMac G5. She has Adobe CS installed. When she tries to open Illustrator, it crashes with an error after it gets to 10% loading font menu.

I have tried reinstalling CS and it still doesn't work.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks in advance,

Mugs

 

[mugs82]

I forgot to tell you she is running Tiger with the latest updates.

 

[jmgalvin]

Go to user/library/preferences and trash "com.adobe.illustrator.plist' and see if AI launches, If not go back to preferences and trash everything referring to Illustrator including com.adobe.illustrator.plist. Then reinstall. If, by any chance, there is antivirus software on the computer, make sure to disable before installing Illustrator. For some reason, Illustrator is particularly fussy about antivirus software, although antivirus/antispyware etc. should be disabled when installing any apps on a mac.

If using a font management utility like Suitcase, disable any autoactivation and look for any updates from the company making the font utility.

One other thing that can cause problems is a corrupted font cache, Go to Finder/Find and search under Name Contains "adobefnt" Trash everyting that comes bacl with the ".lst" extension.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[ObviousTroll]

Another suggestion - if jmgalvin's idea doesn't work, pull all the fonts off her system, then see if AI starts. If it does, start re-adding the fonts a few at a time till the font-of-evil is exposed as the source of her problems.

 

[mugs82]

Thank you very much for your replies...

I tried the first suggestion, but it did not help. Strangely enough, the same user is now having an issue with InDesign...It starts and then crashes after it loads.

I am going to try removing the fonts. I'll post the results ASAP.

 

[ObviousTroll]

You may also want to run DiskUtility; repair the volume and then repair permissions.

 

[jmgalvin]

Be careful on fonts. If you go to hard drive/library/application support/Adobe, you'll find a folder called "fonts". In that folder you find a folder called "Req'd".

You can't dump that folder and expect the various Adobe apps to work correctly.

OXZ font difficulties are for more often tied otp corrupted font caches than the fonts themselves. OSX uses the caches to avoid damaging the actual font file if an app crashes, etc.

You might consider going to versiontracker.com and downloading Font Finagler. Pay the tiny shareware fee and use it to clear all font caches on a Mac - except the Adobe ones. Font Finabler can cure a lot of headaches.

If your user happens to use Creative Suite - rather than separately purchased programs, you might consider reloading the whole suite. That will replace certain files/folders that share a dependency. Any of those could be corrupted.

One other thing to keep in mind is whether a major OXS upgrade was downloaded and installed - usually incesing the version number from something like 10.3.6 to 10.3.8. On occasion, we have found that such an upgrade broke certain apps. We expeienced it with Word and with Acrobat. They required a manual removal, including prefs, application support, etc before reinstalling.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4