The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I have recently been installing Adobe Photoshop CS4 here at work as part of the Design Premium suite and we have occasionally run into a few snags.  What happens is that Photoshop will crash on load so you can’t actually use it.

This doesn’t happen with any of the other Adobe products in the suite, and Photoshop always crashes on the “Building TWAIN Menu Items” part of the loading process.  I investigated this further and figured out how to resolve the issue so this might help anyone else who has this issue.

Basically, go to your Program Files\Adobe\Plugins\Import-Export\ folder and look for an .8BA file that has TWAIN somewhere in the title.  Rename that file, adding a ~ (tilde - found on the very upper left of your keyboard to the left of the number 1) to the beginning of it.  What this does is tells Adobe not to load the TWAIN plugin.

The reason this problem occurs is related to TWAIN drivers that Adobe doesn’t understand that have been loaded by your multi-function printer software which is why this crash only occurs for some people.  Uninstalling the printer or reinstalling Photoshop will NOT fix the issue, you have to remove the offending plugin instead.  Don’t worry, you will still have import from scanner support in your Photoshop (scanners are TWAIN devices).  Windows has something called “Windows Image Acquisition” or WIA for short that will let you use a generic interface for the import of scans.

Hopefully this will help anyone who is having issues getting their Photoshop to load.  Note: this will also work on Macs you just need to do the same thing, rename the plugin or move it out of the plugins folder entirely so that Adobe won’t try to load it and crash.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!