If it did not prompt you, to confirm the preferences deletion then you did not clear the preferences, and that's where I suspect the problem still lies.  I believe your preferences may have become corrupted.  Or did I misunderstand you?  It should prompt to confirm deletion of your existing preferences but does not tell you it's done so.  It just is supposed to come up.  If it did not prompt to confirm, you may not have gotten the keys down quickly enough.

Another possibility is that you've installed a plug-in that is crashing Photoshop when it's coming up and enumerating all the plug-ins in your plug-ins folder.   Done anything in there lately?

-Noel

Have you put in any new fonts recently?

What's the last thing you perceive it showing in the splash screen, which (if I recall correctly) shows the progress of things it's doing during startup.

I'm not sure whether it dates all the way back to Photoshop CS3, but Photoshop writes a file called PSErrorLog.txt in your Preferences area that might have some info to help diagnose why it's not coming up.

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/functions-names-locations-preferen ce-files.html

If these things don't help, I'm a little out of my element to go further with this as I am not a Mac expert.

-Noel

Station_two, please indulge me for a moment...  Is a "crash report" something that's well known to Mac users in general?  If not, is there an easy way to tell people where to look?

I'm always interested in learning how better to advise folks on the "other side of the fence" to diagnose problems.

Thanks.

-Noel

media_geekboy wrote:

 

...have searched my computer and I haven't found a PSErrorLog.txt file or a crash  report...

No, you won't find them that way.  Apple has declared those files off limits to the utterly useless Spotblight and the Finder's search tool (Command F) which uses Spotblight as its search engine.  Use EasyFind or FindAnyFile instead.

NOTE: Spotblight is my idiolectal, pejorative designation for Apple's intrusive "Spotlight".

The crash reports are hidden in the Library.  If you are not familiar with their location they'll most likely be indecipherable to you anyway.  The Adobe engineers can interpret them, though.

You should try the suggestions re fonts and fonts cache I made earlier.

I'm sorry to ask something obvious, but have you tried rebooting the Mac?

-Noel

I've had Spotlight permanently disabled for so long (since it first appeared on the scene with Tiger) that I'm unaware of any advances it has made.  I find its intrusiveness plain unacceptable.

Find Any File and Easy Find don't require indexing.

Thank you for providing that information, which will certainly benefit others who have not deactivated Spotlight (which also disables Finder search).

(That Blue theme is almost as bad as a Windows interface.) 

conroy wrote:

 

At least the corners aren't pointy

...and that's a good thing.  What really bothers me in the Blue theme are the multicolored traffic lights which interfere with my perception/judgment of color in my images.  I'm totally used to the Graphite theme.

I had this same problem on my PowerPC iMac.  I tried all the suggestions I could find when Googling, but could never resolve the problem.  My CD drive wouldn't work either so I couldn't just reload the software.  Finally, I caved and upgraded to a new iMac.  After I migrated all my software and data from the old Mac to the new, CS3 worked perfectly!  Photoshop is incredible and super fast now and can handle HUGE files.  It was worth every penny for the new Mac.  I strongly recommend this a a solution to your problem.  Good luck!

media_geekboy wrote:

 

Conroy,

I did the same search that you are showing here but I never found any PSErrorLog.txt file

That suggests that your user Library contains no file with that name.

BTW have you repaired your permissions?