Adobe Photoshop CS Forum

I'm testing this on a corporate version of Photoshop CS that supposedly doesn't do product activation, although it may still invoke a stub at startup and cancel out--I don't know the mechanics behind it.

Photoshop CS installs fine, and seems to start up fine too (with --winver winxp or win2000 parameters) until a message appears that says "Unable to continue because of hardware or system error. Sorry, but this error is unrecoverable."

A quick look through online help says this message means:

• You should make sure Photoshop is not running in XP's compatibility mode. How the app tells or what this breaks, I don't know. Hopefully this mechanism doesn't just detect Wine and bail out.

• Defragment your hard disk. Probably some default scratch file minimum size problem. Unlikely to be a problem in Wine, I think.

• Trouble creating the file AdobeFnt.lst, or damaged fonts. I think this may actually be a likely culprit. If Photoshop actually itemizes each font, queries data for it, and makes its own list, are we sure Wine is getting correct and/or enough information from Xft?

Hope this helps. I can provide trace logs etc to whoever can tell me how to produce them. I'll also try copying an AdobeFnt.lst file from a working Windows installation and see what happens (I strongly doubt it will fix it).

The AdobeFnt.lst files are located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\TypSpt and C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts for Photoshop 6.0 running under Wine on the same machine. Because of the lack of version-specificity in the path, I'd guess both versions of Photoshop use the same files.

Photoshop 6 builds both AdobeFnt.lst files at startup if they aren't already present. Photoshop CS does not (under Wine), which I take to mean that the error is either earlier in startup than the font list-building routine, or that the error is in the font list-building routine itself.

Photoshop CS does not work using the AdobeFnt.lst files created by Photoshop 6 (dang!). This could mean that Photoshop CS attempts to validate/update these data files and fails, or that this whole thing is a red herring and the error is elsewhere.

My guesses for other candidates are all calls to APIs that Wine may not fully support: some display color profile API, accessibility API, or crypto API (for product activation). If there's any way to trace this, again, let me know. I'm pretty much out of useful ideas.

Has anybody solved this problem yet? (i.e. had the problem of unrecoverable error, and then found a way around it?)

Eric