Computer question regarding possible program conflicts.

I have Photoshop 7.0 on my computer, and i use it quite frequently for my digital pictures, and for other web-related stuff. Last night i was using Photoshop and i began having problems with it. The program would freeze up just after loading, and i would have to Ctrl-Alt-Del to get out of it. I just couldn’t get it to work at all.

Now, earlier in the day i had loaded the Skype VOIP program to allow me to use my computer for international telephone calls. It worked very well, and i had a couple of long conversations with friends and family overseas.

But, as it was the only thing i had added to my computer recently, i was worried that it might be the cause of my Photoshop problems, so i tried uninstalling Skype to see if this fixed the problem. It didn’t. I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling Photoshop, but this didn’t work either. So, in the end, i tried a System Restore, going back one week. That seemed to fix the problem, and everything was fine. At this stage, i wasn’t even sure whether or not Skype had actually been to blame for the problem.

So, i installed Skype again and, lo and behold, got exactly the same problem, with Photoshop resolutely refusing to work. Now, this time i did a bit of investigating and found that this problem with Photoshop ONLY occurs in the particular WinXP account where i use Skype. If i log out of that account, and go to another account, then Photoshop seems to work fine, as long as i don’t open Skype in that account.

This suggests to me that, when i open Skype, the program might be messing up the registry settings in the one user account. That’s the only explanation i can think of for this problem. Now, i think i can work around this problem by creating a separate user account just for Skype calls, but that seems to be a rather awkward, and messy solution. If anyone has any suggestions on what the actual problem might be, or how to fix it, i’d be most appreciative.

System:

P4 3.0GHz, 1Gb RAM
WinXP Home SP1
SB Live 5.1 Soundcard

By the way, i have a ZoneAlarm firewall, AVG AntiVirus, MS AntiSpyware, Spybot S&D, AdAware, and Spyware Blaster on my computer. I ran virus and malware scans before trying anything else, and got no indication of any infection.