Adobe Photoshop CS4 has stopped working

"Adobe Photoshop CS4 has stopped working"

What a  fun and useless error message.  I've just finished installing CS4 Master collection on Win 7 64bit and photoshop is DOA. I have tracked the problem to a bad plug-in.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Plug-ins\Extensions\ScriptingSupport.8li.

I simply removed that plug-in from the directory (after much experimenting) and tada! working photoshop. Now to look for updates.


Then....

"Adobe has detected that the application Adobe Illustrator CS4 has unexpectedly quit." with a little popup about ScriptingSupport.aip.

Remove that plug-in and restart....

Now its "ScriptsMenu.aip" and "Services.aip" that its having trouble with but the program seems to be mostly functional.   Remove them aswell.

Now Illustrator loads without errors... stranger.


Then

"Adobe InDesign CS4 has stopped working".... pattern anyone?

Tried moving various bits from InDesign and I can't isolate the problem.

Moving on....


Acrobat works fine.

"After Effects error: Crash occured while invoking plug-in "Scripting"."  Tada!

If I remove the "Scripting.AEX"... After Effects loads and works. 

Contribute is still choaking on a missing serial number.... fix that later.

Bridge is playing dead.

Device Central seems fine.

"Adobe had detected that the application Adobe Encore has unexpectedly quit.".... really??? Ya think?
No obvious error messages and removing the plug-in's does not help... will try more later.

Extension Manager works.

Fireworks CS4 seems good.

Flash CS4 works fine.

Media Encoder CS4 seems fine.

On Location CS4 seems fine.

Premier Pro CS4 seems fine.

Soundbooth is choaking on a missing serial number. Fix that later.

Pixel Bender and Reader seem fine.

What a mess....


The next day

Run a whole bunch of updates via the auto updater. Just about everything seems to have received an update. ...

Acrobat 9.5.0 - Working
After Effects 9.0.3 - Crash while invoking plug-in 'Scripting".  A few more messages then the final creash report dialog.
Bridge ??? - ???
Contribute 5.0 - Working bar serial number
Device Central 2.0  - Working
Dreamweaver 10.0 build 4117 - Seems fine
Encore  -  Crash straight to crash report dialog.
Extension Manager - Seems fine.
Fireworks 10.0.3.011 - Seems fine.
Flash 10.0.2 - Seems fine.
Illustrator 14.0.0 - Loaded Fine (But useless as its missing tool panels) until I added the scripting plugin's back.  Then crash to crash report dialog.
InDesign 6.0.6 - ...has stopped working. Not even a crash report dialog....

Media Encoder 4.2.0.006 - Seems Fine.

OnLocation 4.0.3.003 - Seems Fine
Photoshop 11.0.2 - Broken again. Not even a crash report dialog.
Premier Pro 4.2.1 - Seems Fine.
SoundBooth 2.0.1 - (No serial still ) Seems fine.
Reader 10 - Seems fine.

Check for More Updates....
Says there were 6 updates pending...

Extension manager, Some common updates, Photoshop camera raw, Device central, Version Cue server... must have been something else I missed. 
Not much of use it would seem...

After Effects 9.0.3  - still crashes when invoking "Scripting" plugin.
Encore - Still crashes completely.
Illustrator - (With the scripting plugins still added ) still crashes. So I have removed them and it seems stable.
InDesign - still crashes to death.
Photoshop - Still crashes to death. (However if I remove the ScriptingSupport.8li plugin ... it works!)

I can live without AfterEffects, Encore and InDesign... but I would rather get what has been paid for...

Indepth fiddling

Indesign is loading all the pluging successfully but is crashing at "Initialising Panels".  Which seems to be where it start trying to "Use" the plug-ins.  So perhaps the coders for InDesign have just delayed the Initialisation step away from the load step... unlike the other dev teams.  Same crash problem just delayed in the setup.  My thesis is still that its a bad plugin.

Nope... remove all plugins and it still crashes at "Starting up Panels".... damit.

Pull out Process Monitor...

The last issue before it choaks to death is InDesign tries to create a file in a write protected directory.
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CS4\ExtendScriptResources\extendscript-en_GB.dat"

The file does not exist and the directory is write protected....

Remove the write protection.... what do you know... I can't.... after trying much stupidity... I copied another of the data files ( the en_US.dat) and renamed it and it now is not failing in ProcMon. (This missing file is probably a bug for Adobe to fix but it does not seem like its the cause of this crash.

The final line in ProcMon before the thread exits is querying a Quicktime file QuickTime.qts which works.... interestingly when I filter for quicktime in the path, there is a missing dll called QuickTimeGlue.dll. It should be in the InDesign directory.??? Not sure if this is significant. Quick copy and paste from one of the other Adobe products and.... still dead on arrival.

Incompatable with DisplayFusion?   Nope.

Lots of Buffer Overflows reported.  Seems to be making a mess looking at some security files....
Couple of Buffer Too Small's... nasty.

All manner of issues in the ProcMon trace but mostly its just noise... nothing obvious to track down.  Just evidence of lazy programming.

Dead end?

Time to crack open the debugger....  crash is happening in ntdll.dll which is a system file. 

Im getting an unhandled exception at 0x773415de in ntdll.dll.  Its just incrementing a register by 4. Probably walking a data structure or overflowing a buffer....

Ok, after a very long pile of Unhandled exceptions..... I got bored.  This is a mess that I just cannot gracefully fix. 

On to other problems.