Photoshop Elements 3.0 problems

There are a number of serious deficiencies when running PSE from a
non-admin account. First, on installation of PSE, the included Help
application does not work at all unless you are an admin user. There
are some Terminal tricks you can use to get it working, which have been
posted to MacOSXHints.com at:

<http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041029173051401&query=ph
otoshop+elements+help>

That page also mentions a concern about the possible corruption of data
if two users on the same machine try to have PSE running at the same
time. It sounds theoretical and untested, but concerning nonetheless.

Second, it appears that all of the help documents are archived and
created on demand. Unfortunately, the folder they are created in is
not write accessible to non-admin users, so you can't actually *access*
any help even if you do get the Help app working! Through trial and
error (and reinstalling PSE three times), I have found that the
offending folder (or at least the major one, I can't say for sure there
aren't more) is located at:

/Library/Application\
Support/Adobe/PhotoshopElementsHelp/en_US/Cache/57/3.0/en_US/html/page/

If you navigate to this folder in the Finder (while logged in as an
admin user), you can change its permissions via the Get Info window to
allow write access. (Or, if you prefer, you could use chmod and chown
in the Terminal.) I changed the owner of that folder to my admin user
and the group to "staff", making sure to give both read and write
access.

Just thought folks might want to know about this! :-)

--
-Thomas

<http://www.bitjuggler.com/>