I’ve had a strange problem with Photoshop 7.0 from time to time on my Mac, when using the software under a secondary user account on the computer. Let me explain that a bit. I’m the only user on my Mac, but I have it set up with two user accounts, both with admin privileges (“admin” in this case not being the same thing as “root”). One account is my “primary” account, which I use for almost everything, including using Photoshop. The secondary account I use strictly for perusing adult entertainment. This setup allows me to keep my “adult” activities completely separate from my “normal” activities - i.e. I can freely bookmark adult Web sites, etc. under the secondary account, while keeping the bookmarks and browser histories in my “primary” account clean. This way, in the unlikely event somebody else accesses my computer they won’t be confronted with the “adult” stuff.
I also use Photoshop under the secondary account, and that’s where the problem occasionally crops up. Every once in a great while, I launch Photoshop and it gets most of the way through the launch sequence, but then it aborts and pops up an alert with words to the effect of “Photoshop could not be started because you do not have the necessary authorization.” This is only under the secondary user account — Photoshop continues to launch without a problem under my primary account.
The first time this happened, a few years ago, I was able to watch the launch sequence and determine at what point the launch was choking (by watching the progression of “Loading this, loading that, blah blah blah” on the splash screen) and I was able to trace the problem to a particular configuration file — it seems it had something to do with either fonts or plugins — that had somehow gotten its file permissions changed. I corrected the permissions on that file, and the problem was fixed.
Since then, the same thing has happened 3 or 4 times. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to recall which file caused the problem the first time, and my attempts at tracking it down again have been unsuccessful. As a result the only way I’ve been able to correct the problem has been to delete the secondary account completely and then create a new secondary account. Photoshop once again launches without a problem under the new account. As you can imagine, this is a royal pain in the neck, since I have to completely rebuild the new account with all its settings, my third-party app launcher software, bookmarks, passwords, etc.
Has anybody else encountered this problem and found a simpler solution (best solution: the name and location of the file that keeps getting screwed up)?
The problem has continued to crop up through several versions of Mac OS X - I think I was still running 10.2.x the first time it happened, and now I’m up to 10.4.11. Photoshop 7.0 throughout.