Issues with PhotoShop CS4 (take 2)

Welcome to round two of my battle with Photoshop CS4. In the first round, I expressed some issues with performance, menus and 64bit usability/testing and support. As I mentioned in my first post it was time to take the issue to the Forums as the email support Adobe has (while appreciated) isn’t that great.The Adobe forums are FANTASTIC, the people are very helpful, full of information and ideas to try. I tried them all and despite several people trying to give me an idea of what could be causing the screen and menu redraw issues was beyond me. After three days of fighting with the program I got out my old developer tools and did some spying on the windows message loop. I discovered what was wrong and wrote a small program to fix the issue. Then in my triumph over the issue I discovered the root cause and am here to tell you, it wasn’t Adobe.The real culprit was Nik Software’s Select tool. Apparently, the select tool for Nik’s Color Efex and Silver Efex software caused several issues with the Menu’s in CS4 and the programs ability to re-draw the screen. (My symptoms exactly). I discovered this when I was searching for 64bit versions of my plug-ins. I eventually (even though I fixed it the hard way) reached a point where my frustration with the speed of the 32bit version of CS4 on XP64 was too slow and I wanted to use the 64bit version. So, in my search for 64bit plug-ins I discovered a KB article on the NIK web site that mentioned this display issue. The company has it fixed in the Define product. Since the Select interface is common amongst Color Efex, Silver Efex and Define you only need it once. A quick update of my software and the problem was gone. (Now I had to go eliminate my program which forced a WM_PAINT message to be sent to Photoshop so it would re-draw its screen, but that’s another story).So, if you or anyone you know is experiencing re-draw, re-fresh or menu access issues in CS4 32bit and use these plug-ins, go download the free trial of Define and you are fixed. The reason this issue never presented in the 64bit CS4 is that the NIK plug-ins aren’t compatible in the 64bit version yet and so the issue never showed up when running that version.The performance of the 32bit version in XP64 with a Dual/Dual Core Xenon Server with 8GB Ram is TERRIBLE. It’s useable, but terrible when compared to CS3 32bit. The 64bit version of CS4 works fine (so far) in Windows XP64 and is much faster. Only a handful of my plug-ins are compatible. When I can get them all in place, I won’t be using the 32bit version anymore. Yes, there is that much of a difference in the two. Especially when you need that extra RAM to work on files that are between 300MB and 1GM each.Now that I have the basic UI issue solved and have to deal with the speed issue for the time being, I will focus on writing a review on the actual program. Thanks again to everyone in the Adobe Forums, the help was sincerely appreciated and thanks to the team at NIK for quickly identifying the issue and having a fix in place.</david>