Photoshop Stopped Working :-(

If you have been unfortunate enough to see the error information below, you'll understand the pain.

The Problem

Over the last few days I have seen numerous reports of people having Photoshop CC 2015 crash on startup with a rather obscure (unhandled exception) bubbling up to the operating system. Specifically reporting a 0xc0000005 (Access Violation) at 0x000000000385514d.

I know, geek speak right there.

Reporting the Issue

A quick search on Adobe Forums revealed a problem that had already been reported, see it here:

Sadly the advice coming from Adobe themselves wasn't of much help to anyone on the thread. The closest they got was deleting the users account and recreating it on the machine. (NOT A GOOD IDEA!)

Irritation

A day later, and still no fix from Adobe, or even a suggestion that gets closer to a proper workaround without deleting your account and migrating across a lot of data from one account to another. And I have a shoot that needs to be processed.

Doing a Little Digging

Sadly I cannot directly debug Photoshop.exe, since the debug symbols aren't available. So I started looking for files being referenced by the executing threads during the crash, specifically those housed within the users profile.

I quickly (within minutes) had the culprit file identified.

The Fix

So, here is a temporary fix while we wait for Adobe to properly fix the issue.

The problem file is librarylookupfile, which can be found in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Creative Cloud Libraries\LIBS

Renaming or deleting this file immediately resolves the issue for me.

Continuing to the Source of the Problem

Looking at the file's contents before removing it, and after it was recreated, the original is clearly corrupt, containing a bunch of gibberish that looks encoded, but actually isn't. The recreated file is human readable and contains a reference to a brush shape that I created using Adobe's Shape app on my iPad the day before.

Something must have gone wrong during the sync process when the shape was brought down from the cloud.

Update - 2015-06-24

Adobe is now using this information to look into this specific problem. They'll hopefully have a permanent for it very soon.

On another note, I've also seen reports of Illustrator crashing with the same message. They probably share the load block of code to process that file. 

Update - 2015-07-09

It has been a few weeks since the original post, and sadly Adobe still haven't really addressed this issue.

Adobe support appear to be unaware of the workaround, which is completely unacceptable to me. Please share this post far and wide so that others may use their Adobe applications again as well.

Update - 2015-07-20

Adobe have finally added this to their official "fix" list, which can be found here.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-crash-with-faulty-module-photoshop-exe.html

Still no actual solution to the issue.

Update - 2015-08-04 - Adobe Official Solution

I received a notification this morning that Adobe have released a new update for CC 2015 that resolves this issue.

The official release notes can be viewed here: http://blogs.adobe.com/crawlspace/2015/08/photoshop-cc-2015-0-1-update-now-available.html 

The exception that was raised by the corrupt file is now properly handled. You will still experience problems if the file is corrupted, but you will be met with a dialog notifying you and not a crash.

Also note that the usage of the librarylookupfile now appears to be delayed until you try to access the Libraries panel, and no longer at the startup of Photoshop.

Update - 2015-11-04 - Helping you with other problems

We are seeing a lot more comments of unsuccessful fixes, which is not surprising, since Adobe have resolve this specific issue.

I've put together another article to help you search for solutions to other problems.

How Fault Code and Offset Work

I'm disabling the comments section on this post, please reply to the new post if you need help.

Thanks