What is a user account?
A user account is your personal environment on a computer or network. It stores your files and settings behind a login name and, generally, a password. Each account also has set disk permissions.
What are disk permissions?
Each file and folder on your computer has a set of permissions, that is, rules for what you are allowed to do with that specific item. Whether or not you are allowed to see, open, delete, change, or perform any action with a given file is determined by permissions. Most disk permissions are determed by user groups. For example, if your user account has Admin access, this means the account is part of an Administrator group and therefore has read and write access to most files on the system. Multiple accounts on a given computer can be part of the same group (e.g. you can have multiple administrators, there is no such thing as "the administrator"). It is possible to have custom groups, with customized permissions. It is also possible for a given user account to be part of multiple groups. Specific permissions can be set on a per account basis as well. So user disk permissions can get pretty muddled.
Why create a new user account?
Sometimes the behavior of an application can be affected by disk permissions or your personal settings. A new user account will only have group permissions and default ("factory") personal settings. This helps to clean up the environment that an application is running in, making sure past changes are not the source of your issue.
The issue I am troubleshooting doesn't happen in the new user account. Now what?
While it is possible to migrate your files and settings to a new user account, this can often be more trouble than it's worth (and might migrate the problem at the same time). While we here at Adobe cannot fix user accounts (that is the domain of OS manufacturers and IT administrators), we can provide a list of possible solutions to try:
