I upgraded to CS3 a few weeks ago and everything was running fine. Last night i was making a few shirt designs with my friend, but i closed photoshop and tried to re-open it about 15 minutes later
i got a system error that forced me to close the process
i tried illustrator to see if the problem occured there too and the same error closed illustrator
the error occurs during the initialization process for photoshop before it even loads fonts and brushes
then today i had some time so i uninstalled my adobe products and attempted to reinstall
the install went flawlessly but the problem still occurs with photoshop and illustrator anyway
im using windows xp sp2 with all the latest updates as of 5/18/07 3pm
ive taken screenshots of the errors

http://www.pacificx.net/squr3l/error1.JPG
http://www.pacificx.net/squr3l/error2.JPG
http://www.pacificx.net/squr3l/error3.JPG

because it lists gdiplus.dll as the modname in the error signature, i downloaded a copy of gdiplus.dll from a site and placed it in both the windows/system32 and windows/system folders because i could not figure out the exact location
there werent any original gdiplus.dll files in either directory though so i believe i may be wrong
i also tried searching the windows folder for gdiplus.dll and it crashed explorer.exe so maybe my windows installation became corrupted

thanks for reading this long post and thanks in advance for the help =D

Tried a system restore?

havent tried that yet, i guess that would be a good thing to try before i reinstall windows
this really pissed me off
and i forgot to add one other detail about what happened
i had photoshop running and i installed about 200 fonts then i closed it
and 15 minutes later it wouldnt load
i doubt that could have caused any damage but i figured i would add it in case

ok i did a system restore to wednesday but on boot up it wouldnt load explorer.exe and gave me an error that basically said it couldnt locate normaliz.dll and since that was probably worse than not being able to run photoshop i used ctrl alt dlt to run msconfig and then launch system restore to restore it back
i got the same error when i undid the restore so i was kinda annoyed by this point
i restored to about a week ago and it loaded up but none of my startup programs nor network connections launched for about 10 minutes after boot and most of my programs were broken
photoshop gave me some error about a catastrophic license failure and my symantec would not run realtime monitoring
after about 3 more restores i got it back to todays version before any restores took place
my photoshop is still broken but at least my other programs are working
i think i might just reinstall windows and start clean again

No need to do that. Just reinstall Photoshop CS3. I had the same problem as you. I reinstalled and its been working fine since!

did you read any of that lol? i uninstalled and reinstalled cs3 no less than 5 times including using the cs3 cleaner between installs and nothing changes

Well first things first, do you have legit copies of the Adobe products? If not, then that might be a problem, heh.

If it is, then have you recently installed any new plug-ins or anything like that?

As for the problem with the gdiplus.dll, I'm not sure where that comes from. gdiplus.dll is basically required for Windows to function correctly, so you should have it. It's normally located in C:\WINDOWS\system32. You said you downloaded a copy of it from somewhere, where did you get it from?

umm...
well i didnt install and plugins at all
the only system change i made between photoshop working and not was installing fonts
i didnt have a gdiplus.dll in system32 folder for some reason, so the one i downloaded from http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?gdiplus
didnt replace anything when i installed it there
and installing that dll didnt change any of the errors

I got exactly the same problem after installing new fonts(paste new fonts into windows default font folder). Now I do a system restore and not installing any fonts until solution comes up.

This may be unrelated to your original problem, but often my old pc did it alot with other problems. What ever your using to run your 'skinned desktop' will probably be taking a lot of RAM, as will CS3. Perhaps a lack of RAM is the problem. As I say, it may not be the reason!

It wont be to do with his skinning because I run a similar program to make my Windows XP Vista Edition work and I don't get any problems.

First things first, try to remember what fonts you put in and delete them, then download the AVG Rootkit Finder and then run it. See what happens.

Rest of your reply removed as per our guidelines http://www.pixel2life.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1278

I am also getting this error after installing fonts. The only problem is that I installed over 100 fonts and don't know the names of all of them:( Every time I try to open Illustrator it crashes, referencing the same dll as above. I have tried reinstalling as well.

help?

edit:

I narrowed the font down to matricula_espanola that I got from dafonts.com. After I deleted it out of my fonts directory Illustrator booted up fine.

I had the exact same problem when I found this topic. I read your post about the font, so I went to see if I had it aswell, and well I did. So I deleted it and it works like a charm now

Thanks a lot

It seems the fonts problem is somewhat more complex.
I had the same problem with CS3 and I have stumbled upon this thread. I Immediately went to my fonts directory and moved all the latest fonts to a temp directory. CS3 kicked back to life like magic.
Then I started moving the fonts back chunk by chunk to try and pinpoint the one that was causing the troubles. Finally I moved them ALL back in.
Still works fine. (But I am still keeping CS2 installed.. One never knows...)
Can someone explain?

ShyB

Thank you so much, I've been searching for a resolution to this problem for about a week now and found no answer. Someone had said something about a font that had caused the problem but didn't mention which one. I just got the program and was unable to do anything, and now can't wait to be able to use it when I get home from work. Thanks again!!!

with me i had problems when trying to use an adobe product on the same time a certain tool "AVIconverter" was running making a small movie for my mp4 player --> deinstalling that utility and reinstalling and restarting the pc saved my day.