Photoshop 5.5 will not load properly

[chays]

I have a brand new Dell 4300 with over 500MB of ram. I am using Windows 2000. I am using Photoshop 5.5. I have Photoshop utilizing a 7 GB Scatch disk with nothing on it. The problem is that after working in it for some time I will close it, open it back up and it will not work. The tool bar will not display all it's items and operations are sluggish or imposible. This especially happens if I have opened another program like Adobe Illustrator 8.0 and then open Photoshop. Closing it and reopening photoshop does not work. Does anyone have a solution. This also occured on an NT system I used in the past.

Thanks

 

[askIllustrator]

Have you installed the Photoshop 6.0.1 patch? Have you upgraded to Win2k service pack 2? Do you have a ton of apps in your system tray at startup? Are you using an NTFS or Fat32 file system? Do you keep all of your fonts in the WINNT fonts folder or you use a font manager? Do you have any virus software running? Did the OS come preinstalled? Is it Win2k professional or server? Do you have any generic video or sound cards? Do you have the latest drivers for everything and are there any conflicts between them? Do you have any USB devices connected to the machine? Why didnt you buy a MAC? Hehe, just kidding about that last one.