Trashes, crashes, and dead ends

[JeffK]

Hi all:
So Thursday evening, PS starting acting a bit forgetful - either no response or late response on edits, or hanging up entirely. By yesterday morning, when trying to launch PS, starting getting messages about missing dll's.
I tried reinstalling, restarting, running disk scans and malware scans. Didn't make a difference. Got in touch with Adobe and was on the phone with them for close to 4 hours. Turned over control of my PC to them. They did a complete clean and reinstall, but no change. All they could offer me was to upgrade my OS which meant a new laptop.
So I dug in myself and started replacing the missing dll's - a total of 9 with the prefixes beginning with "api-win-core..." (I know I'm getting a bit technical which is somewhat beyond me as well...)
Now I can get PS to start, get to the initialization stage, and get this message:



I tried again with uninstall and reinstall and here's where I'm stuck. I'm now one step away from ordering a new laptop, updating my OS and updating PS to latest version. Which I hate doing since the only reason I would spend the $$$ is just to get one piece of software to run.
I've searched the net and have read of others hitting a dead end with no solution seeming to work. So I'm here where I know there are some excellent technicians who might give me some insight before I open my wallet. Let me know what you think - all help, guidance, and possible solutions will be most welcome! BTW - I'm running Windows 7 with PS 2018. No other issues or problems.
- Jeff

 

[thebestcpu]

Hi @JeffK
I am not the expert you need to do brain surgery on Windows OS. I also don't know what the techs did when they tool control over your computer.
Pretty odd that some DLLs went missing and hard to know what the root causes are. Here are some thoughts:

It would be good to make sure you disk is in good shape using an appropriate windows utility as a starting point. You or the techs may have already done so.
Do you have a backup strategy where you could restore you entire HDD to a prior state before you were seeing problems. If so, that could be a path to take (if not lesson learned and get a good backup strategy for the future).
If you do have a good backup strategy that was recent, you could do the restore and you could be back in business right away.
If the backup was not too recent, you could save the files that are more recent to a backup drive, do the restore, and then bring back in just the most recent files from the backup separately.

Though it has been some time, my experience with this type of problem particularly on Window OS that are not being supported anymore is that you could spend a lot and time and energy trying to bring the system back after it "coded" yet it can be a sign of future "condings" to come. So depending on how you value you time, the least expensive route may not be sticking with Win 7 and you existing hardware. Just a heads up not to get stuck down that path if the issues cannot be resolved in a timely fashion.

Fingers crossed for you no matter what path you take
John Wheeler

 

[JeffK]

Hi @JeffK
Pretty odd that some DLLs went missing and hard to know what the root causes are. Here are some thoughts:
....
Fingers crossed for you no matter what path you take
John Wheeler

Many thanks for the response, John. Unfortunately, I discovered in this adventure that I never set restore points on this laptop. So can't go back in time. I do have a backup hard drive - that lesson learned- although I backup only files and folders. So can't really recover the entire system.
Bottom line is what you've said - I'm working with an unsupported version of PS on an unsupported OS. Maybe it's time. It's just a personal philosophy that I just don't give up on things until they're beyond repair. And it's so odd that all else works but PS is the only problem.
I'll keep poking at in the meantime - it's an ancient stubborness...
- Jeff

 

[[ iLLuSioN ]]

Have you ever tried to google these 9 photoshop-related files?
Are you sure that "api-win-core" is the correct prefix of these files?

I suspect that it's not Photoshop, but maybe something else (e.g. a broken Microsoft Visual C ++ Runtime Library)

 

[JeffK]

Have you ever tried to google these 9 photoshop-related files?
Are you sure that "api-win-core" is the correct prefix of these files?
I suspect that it's not Photoshop, but maybe something else (e.g. a broken Microsoft Visual C ++ Runtime Library)

I have a suspicion the same as you - something else is going on which adds to the mystery why these dll files suddenly went missing. They're valid files - can't confirm if they belong on my system but the warning dialogs disappeared. Now just stuck on disk error.
Reran some scans, deleted any recently installed files, ran a system registry restore. Same issues. Can't find out exactly what that disk error means.
Will keep at at ... carefully...
- Jeff

 

[JeffK]

Update - although I ordered a new laptop last night, decided to give it the old college try one more time
Cleaned out any recent/unused software, then using Adobe's Creative Cloud Cleaner tool, uninstalled all Adobe products including Creative Cloud.
Went back to my Adobe account and downloaded a fresh desktop app for Creative Cloud.
Then went on a hunt and found the site for previous versions of PS , downloaded and clean installed the version of PS that works for me within Windows 7 limits.
Hit the launch button and we now have PS back up and running!
- Jeff

 

[polarwoc]

Love your "never give up" attitude, @JeffK

 

[thebestcpu]

Have you found a solution to this problem? I have a similar problem

@JeffK provided his solution in post #6 of this thread. Hope that works for you too
John Wheeler