Photoshop Setting file corruption?

[Kirk Gittings]

For the past couple of years Photomerge in PS3 and PS4 has been sufficient for 95 percent of my stitches which are generally simply flat stitches from shifting a lens. These are all building interiors and exteriors with plenty of common points and overlap. This is an important part of my workflow and I do a few of these a week for clients. Up till recently they merged flawlessly. All of a sudden Photomerge can't seem to align any images giving me the error message "some images could not be automatically aligned". This happens under all the different merge modes. This also happens from Bridge or from open files in PS. It literally cannot merge any set of images. This is with the camera always on a tripod and exposure and WB locked down.

The only thing that has changed is I have been playing with memory usage and cache levels trying to improve performance, but even after returning them to the original settings Photomerge will not complete a merge. It matters not what merge mode you use or whether you are working from raw files or tiffs. I am having to do every stitch in Autopano Pro which slows down my workflow considerably.

Someone on the Adobe forums suggested that I delete my preferences in CS4. That did the trick.....temporarily.

So...The Prefs file gets corrupted at the drop of a hat, or mouse! I finally learned, after too much time spent resetting my preferences, to make a copy of the newly set preferences file and keep it on my desktop. When (not if!) Photoshop begins doing strange things I have a fresh copy of the prefs file, with my favorite settings, just waiting for me.

But... Holy Cow! The new Preferences file had already been corrupted by the time I saved it and I had to start over again. I guess you have to save an absolutely clean file freshly set up before you run a single image?

But.... If I close PS, delete the preferences file, open PS, set my new preferences, copy and save that new preferences file and use that the next time the file gets corrupted, that fresh preferences file I saved is already corrupted and I have to delete it and just build a new one from scratch every time. I have tried creating new files eliminating a specific preference setting each time to see if a particular setting is causing the problem but it isn't.

What is causing the settings file to get corrupted??? Any thoughts? This did not happen the first few months of using CS4 at all.

CS4, Windows XP, separate large drive for PS cache.

[Marko]

Could be something entirely different and not Photoshop at all. I'm not saying is, just that it could be.

Two obvious and easy things to try (once you start thinking in that direction) is to check your disk and, since you're on Windows, update your virus checker and run a detailed scan.

[Sevo]

The only thing that has changed is I have been playing with memory usage and cache levels trying to improve performance,

You never installed or updated any plugin?

[percepts]

delete your prefs file and then reboot pc. Then reinstall PS.

[Kirk Gittings]

You never installed or updated any plugin?

Not around the time when this started happening. Not that I can recall.

[Kirk Gittings]

delete your prefs file and then reboot pc. Then reinstall PS.

I have done all that but perhaps not in that order. When I get through this current job, I will try that.