Dreamweaver CS3 crashes and won’t start up again
Hey kids, this is definitely one of the weirdest bugs I have ever clapped eyes on, so to speak.
Not for the first time, I was happily writing CSS and Dreamweaver CS3 crashed.
The crash
Something feels a little too familiar - this is DW after all - but I try to restart anyway: it’s 1am and I don’t need this. Nope, there it is, unequivocal and painfully blunt: Dreamweaver CS3 won’t start on Windows XP.
The following options were available:
- Abuse someone at Adobe
- Reinstall Dreamweaver
- Try to clean out my config files so that Dreamweaver has to create new ones on restart (an old and occasionally successful solution)
It’s a veritable portent of disaster. In these times of dual processors and 32-bit colour, has the long-exorcised ghost of DW’s buggy past returned to haunt us?
Sort of, but the fix turned out to be simple, if somewhat obscure. I shall elaborate in a moment, but first I must attribute my source. In August 2007, Adobe Community Expert and author David Powers solved this profoundly ugly problem in the Macromedia.Dreamweaver Google Group.
Not a byte more, not a byte less
Apparently, an install of Dreamweaver CS3 (mine is currently v9.0 Build 3481) crashes if you edit a file to exactly 8,192 bytes. Not a byte more, not a byte less. [Visitors have since reported that multiples of 8,192 bytes also cause DW to crash - Mike]
Don’t believe me? Well, I’m editing a CSS file, I try to change a pixel value and suddenly it’s all gone. I check David’s comment out and, lo and behold:
So now what?
In Windows Explorer, I temporarily renamed the folder that contained my site and now Dreamweaver CS3 started successfully and with perfect nonchalance, asked me to Manage Sites… because the local root folder no longer exists.
Rather than do that and have it crash again, I closed Dreamweaver CS3 for the moment. I then increased (you could also decrease) the size of the CSS file using Notepad.
Once I was sure my CSS file was no longer 8,192 bytes, I renamed the folder back to its original name in Windows Explorer. I restarted Dreamweaver CS3 once more and I was back in action!
Afterthought
This incident jogged my memory of another oddball software behaviour I encountered recently. Check out this anomaly for Excel 2007: if you multiply 850 by 77.1 you get 100,000. The real answer? 65,535 of course, a juicy, meaningful number for aficionados of binary computing! [15 April 2008: I tested this again recently and it appears to have been patched - Mike]
April 7th, 2008 at 10:01
cheers Mike - worked a treat!
April 14th, 2008 at 23:36
All the resources on the internet, and I find this solution on page 3 of Google search results. This problem didn’t present so much of an inconvenience in CS2 because I was still using notepad interchangeably and must have fixed it without realizing it by using notepad. Now I’ve moved up to CS3 and am far more dependent on DW and couldn’t find my way past the constant crash. Thanks a million for posting this issue!
April 15th, 2008 at 11:23
[...] jeg faldt over dette indlæg på Mike Padgett’s blog. Løsningen var såre simpel. Dreamweaver CS3 har tilsyneladende en bug, der gør at den ikke kan [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 19:11
Thanks for your help. All of a sudden Dreamweaver CS3 just crashed and would not re-open. The intro screen would flash and then nothing would happen. I tried a restart to the computer to no avail. A quick Google search (man I love Google) and I was able to find several references, but most required an uninstall, wiping the registry, etc. I no longer have easy access to the install CD, being part of the corporate machine, so that was not an option. After reading this article, I found that my CSS file was exactly 8,192 bytes. I edited it with notepad, and voila…. Dreamweaver opened just fine.
Very weird bug.
April 15th, 2008 at 19:25
No worries, Chris, I’m happy that this has been helpful to you!
The credit really goes to David Powers as mentioned in the article, who figured this one out some time ago. As I have done in the past with obscure issues, I just wanted to add another voice out there because it took me so long myself to find a fix for this.
No patch yet from Adobe as far as I can see. Let’s hope they sort it. Meantime, if anyone can tell us if this issue occurs in DW8 or even earlier, or when editing other formats than CSS please let us know!
April 16th, 2008 at 15:58
OHMIGOD! That is possible the most ridiculous bug. This is the second time CS3 has bugged out on me, first time the licensing stopped working.
Thanks a million for this solution, was beginning to have feelings of doom about how bad this bug might be, phew.
April 25th, 2008 at 19:28
I am so glad I found your solution. I was just about to start uninstalling and reinstalling and who knows what else.
This probably saved me at least 4 hours of troubleshooting.
Thank you for posting this fix - what a weird bug.
Doug
April 30th, 2008 at 4:09
Amazing! I thought I had tried everything and this really saved the day. Thanks for the post.
May 4th, 2008 at 7:29
Mike,
I just wanted to say thanks for figuring this out first. I was really [word removed] because I’m on a super tight deadline and right when I’m almost completed with my work Dreamweaver decides to go “Capooy”! So I was like what the heck is going on here, and I’m actually on vista (unfortunately, we don’t work on apples at work) and I was like this must be another vista problem, great what do I do now! So I was just trying to do some basic trouble shooting and I realized that I could start because the caching in Dreamweaver would always stop half way through and I get the famous, this application has experienced and error yada yada…etc etc.
So I finally got DW started and I was like “is it my PHP code, did I do something wrong”. I hovered over the css file and “BAM!” that’s when DW stopped running. I spent all this time trying to figure this out and repaired my installation of DW…. all I had to do is search on google for CSS problem with crashing DW and there was my answer…I hate you. JK.
Anyways thanks for giving me a little light on this situation. I’m going to have to tell my colleagues at work to make sure you keep your CSS at a 8kb minimum, WTF is that adobe. Please fix this!
Thanks,
Brad
May 8th, 2008 at 13:17
Thank you so much. Mixed emotions here. From being fuming mad and getting ready to reinstall dreamweaver, to thrilled about such a simple fix, to angry for such a stupid bug, to amazement at how crazy this is!
Thanks SO much. Ever so grateful.
May 15th, 2008 at 17:56
Thanks Mike,
I took the trouble of reinstalling and then again going through google (may be firs time my wordings was not proper!) After browsing through a couple of pages I landed here! Yes my CSS file which I was just modifiying reached the magic mark of 8192! just some blank lines and a cooment line at bottom and saved the file. DW is back after giving me 24 hrs of headache! I have no words to praise you for this post! Keep up the good work of spreading the solutions even though they may available at some other forums, more the better! Thanks once again.
May 23rd, 2008 at 17:18
I had this problem a year or so ago, and resolved it with a series of steps that took some hours and at the time, was I mad … I am at a remote location and my notes weren’t here (turned out that was a good thing) … here comes the problem again … I searched for the solution and found THIS. I realized I had been working on css at the time so I thought, hmmm … first I checked the size of the file, and it was not exactly 8,192 bytes but I tried by using the steps anyway … and it WORKED. Back up and running in less than 5 minutes…. thank you, thank you, to you, David Powers et al. This is a bizarre bug.
May 24th, 2008 at 0:10
Yes, we have encountered this bug on a variety of sites.. Even worse, it happens on MULTIPLES of 8192 bytes. One site we had, the file was 16383 bytes (not 16384, though, which is weird), and it was crashing in the exact same manner.
Really weird that it still crashes even when one byte off, though.
Pretty harsh bug. Basically, Dreamweaver crashes if the filesize of your CSS file is within one byte of a multiple of 8192.
June 2nd, 2008 at 22:24
perfect, i was 1 dice roll away from total reformat of a pc that did not need a format that was 2.5 years old, saved me a lot of hassle, I tried a lot of things before searching for this solution. Yeee all de man!
June 6th, 2008 at 13:28
Incredible ! Only thing is - my .css file was 4.20KB’s and in the properties window said that size on disk is 8.192KB … Amazingly stupid bug … Thanks for this solution and inspired blog post .. ;)
June 7th, 2008 at 19:20
Thanks a lot, saved me a couple of hours!
> Even worse, it happens on MULTIPLES of 8192 bytes.
Absolutely true, DW crashed on my 24575 bytes CSS.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:44
What a lifesaver . . . thank you and thanks for those who mentioned the bug affecting multiples.
I can’t imagine the odds of this but I made an edit that sized my PHP file to 24,576 AND the linked style sheet to 16,384. I feel like I should have won something by hitting those odds but the fix in this post is enough of a prize for me. Thanks again.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:07
As an addendum to my prior comment, I encourage people who encounter this to report it to Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
June 16th, 2008 at 8:51
Holy **** you are the man… What a load of bull****… I almost had to go Office Space on my PC…
June 18th, 2008 at 8:25
I just experienced this problem and did a quick google search and glad to have found your site. Thanks for putting this up.
June 19th, 2008 at 10:32
Crazy ****, thx for the solution Mike, you saved my day man! It really crashes on multiples of 8192, my file was 16.384 Bytes… so strange!
June 21st, 2008 at 15:47
Hi Mike and all,
Ok, Im having this problem but the thing here is I wasnt working on any CSS files. I was working on a html file, it got stuck, crashed and refused to start up now :( I tried uninstalling and re-installing, removing the config files and repairing and also changing the location of my site folder, renaming, but nothing works. Ive gone thru all the CSS files in the DW flder but nothing shows 8192kb…any idea what else I can do to get this prog to start, Thanks
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:43
If this bug is causing Dreamweaver CS3 to crash, the source of the problem will definitely be in the last file you were working on (your HTML file). The file format is not important.
Comments from this thread suggest that the bug causes a crash if the size of the file is 8,192 bytes, or multiples of that (so 4096, 16,384, 24,575, 32,768 … etc).
Hope this helps. If it doesn’t, you have a different issue.
June 22nd, 2008 at 19:44
Increible, agregue un par de lineas para alterar el tamaño del ultimo archivo css en que trabaje y listo, cargo de nuevo el DW.
Muchisimas gracias, ya habia tratado todo y estaba a punto de formatear el disco y reinstalar Vista.
Gracias!
June 28th, 2008 at 23:34
Incredible I got a css file that is 8.192KB … what a !#%* bug … Thanks for this solution and great post ;) Heel erg bedankt.
July 1st, 2008 at 0:49
Big thanks from me too, it’s 23:36 and I’ve got a website to deliver tomorrow. Would you believe it my CSS file hit 8192bytes and nothing worked! Thanks for the tip you’re a lifesaver!
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:28
Happened to me too..thank god for this blog post. It’s been a long day getting up to speed with Vista and I thought this was another Vista bug.
July 4th, 2008 at 0:06
you rock man!!!!! Saved our butts here. Thanks a million!!
July 4th, 2008 at 2:44
[...] respecto a esta tallita de Adobe, encontrarán dos artículos a los que hago referencia. Uno en inglés, bastante extenso y otro en español más [...]