I use Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Web Premium every day, Flash, Fireworks, Photoshop, but most of all Dreamweaver. I consider Dreamweaver CS3 to be the best HTML/CSS visual editor available and a it’s a very handy FTP client as well. It also serves as a nice text editor with syntax highlighting for PHP (although PDT for Eclipse is MUCH better). My problem is that it crashes on me almost every day with this really annoying error: Runtime Error! This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Here’s what it looks like:
This error makes my blood boil! I’ve done everything to try it including, but not limited to:
Delete the configuration Files
This seems to give me the most success. Dreamweaver stores a file cache and some non-site related settings in C:\Users[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration. If you delete or rename this directory then Dreamweaver will recreate it when it starts up.
Delete the Dreamweaver Windows Prefetch file
When a program starts up, Windows tries to optimize the startup process by creating a “cache” type file in C:\windows\Prefetch. Next time the program opens it uses this file to speed up the process. You can safely delete everything in the Prefetch folder. Doing this helped me get Dreamweaver working yesterday.
Get rid of Logitech SetPoint
Someone on an Adobe forum said this worked for them - I haven’t had much success
Restart computer with only essential processes enabled
Also from Adobe, this seems to have no impact on my computer - it still crashes.
Maybe it’s the 8KB file bug???
According to many people on Adobe’s forum, if you a working on a file that is exactly 8,192 bytes (8KB) Dreamweaver will crash. Well, my files are taking up 8,192K because the block size on my disk pushes 7+K files up to 8,192 (look at “size on disk”), but I put a huge HTML comment at the end of the file to push it past 10K and it didn’t help.
Doing the exact same thing every time will make Dreamweaver crash every time
Here’s my most effective solution as of this morning: once Dreamweaver crashes, you can’t do the exact same thing when you reopen it or it will just keep crashing. I was trying to add a 4x3 table to a document and every time I did Insert->Table->OK it immediately crashed (I did this 10+ times while changing other Windows stuff). Then I went to show my business partner and instead of adding a table, I went to a different Site and changed some code around, then when back to the original site and BAM! it works fine now! What the HECK is going on here?
Final thoughts
You know, I’ve been working with Linux and open source software for over 10 years, and I finally break down and by a $2,000+ software package - I expect it to work! If it doesn’t work I expect that I can get support to make it work (and not that “please restart your computer then uninstall/reinstall” BS)! Come on Adobe!!! If I charge my clients >$100/hr and I have to fight with Dreamweaver for 1 hr per day, where’s my $36,500 from Adobe for the last year?
P.S. I think the problem is related to MS Visual Studio 2005’s runtime update and Vista or something.