Elements 8 will not open.

[rivercoon1]

I used Adobe Premier Elements 8 yesterday and it was working just fine, but not today.

Now when I try opening it it goes through the normal start up procedure until the very last step of opening the project requested onto the screen.  Instead it shrinks down to just a tab on my task bar.  If I click this a few times a small window opens over the task bar showing the project but gives me no way to expand it to fill the screen.

I am running an up to date version of Windows 7 Professional with Service Pack 1.

My computer has an AMD Athlon II X4 260 Processor and 8 GB of RAM.

I have tried opening a couple different projects both from my desk top and from Windows Explorer.  I have also tried creating a new project.  Windows Explorer shows the new project was created but all these lead to the same problem detailed above.

Any Ideas on how to get PE8 running again?

[Steve Grisetti]

It's going to be tough to find support for a 7 year old version of the program on a 10 year old operating system.

But one thing worth checking -- Do you have an nVidia graphics card?

[rivercoon1]

I have ATI Radeon 3000 Graphics built into the mother board.

[Steve Grisetti]

Have you updated the graphics driver from the AMD web site?

[rivercoon1]

Yes.  The problem continues unchanged.

[Peru Bob]

Try System Restore.

If that doesn't work, as a long shot, try checking for malware.

[rivercoon1 · Accepted solution]

I found it!

Open Premiere Elements

Go to Task Manager

Right click on Premiere Elements in Task Manager

Hit Maximize

This will open Premiere Elements full screen.  Go to Windows tab and Restore Workspace.  Everything is back to normal.

Not sure what caused the problem but more digging around found references to Windows 7 doing this randomly to other programs.

[Steve Grisetti]

As I've said, it's a very old piece of software on a very old operating. I'm not sure what else to recommend.