So, you’re finding that Adobe Illustrator and OSX 10.4.7 or .8 on an INTEL Mac just don’t live well together. Here are a few things to help that difficult situation:
NOTE: Always have a complete backup before you do any of this!
1/ Turn off Appearance in the Window Menu.
2/ Delete your Illustrator Preferences by:
The first step in troubleshooting most any problem is deleting your Illustrator Preferences file.
The Preferences file is created or updated every time you use Illustrator, and it can often become a hidden source of problems. To delete this file and force Illustrator to create a new one, follow these steps:
Make sure you have the serial numbers for any third party plugins for Illustrator – the numbers will need to be re-entered after deleting prefs
Quit Illustrator
Find the Illustrator Preferences file using the following steps:
i) If you are running Mac OS X, you should delete your preferences folder from your particular user account. You can find the Illustrator preferences in this folder, using the “Go to Folder…” command in the Finder: ~/xxxxx/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator CS2 Settings
ii) Delete the Illustrator Preferences file for the version of Illustrator that is causing problems.
Launch Illustrator, entering any necessary plug-in serial numbers.
iii) Immediately quit Illustrator without opening any documents. Documents can often times be the culprits for corrupting the preferences, especially since Illustrator does not write out new preferences until quit.
iv)Restart Illustrator.
3/ Close the Paths Window, permanently.
You can work around the crashing by not ever opening the appearance palette, or at least by always closing it before you quit, so it won’t be open on the next launch.
WINDOW MENU APPEARANCE or Shift F6
4/ Use Font Fingler and clean all your font Caches:
5/ Close any fonts not required for each job, using your font management application; Extensis Suitcase, FontDoctor, Font Manager or LinoType FontExplorerX:
https://www.linotype.com/fontexplorerX
https://www.extensis.com
https://www.extensis.com
https://www.apple.com/macosx/features/fontbook/
6/ Also ensure you DO NOT have the following ticked in the Illustrator Preferences for:
File handling & Clipboard:
Untick – Enable Version Cue
Untick – Copy as PDF
Quit Illustrator and Restart
7/ Repair permissions on your Mac using the Disk Utility application the Restart you Mac again.
/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility
8/ On iMacs, Mac Pro and MacBooks we have found that many of the problems seem to be with Ram access. Though most of this hardware has a maximum memory of 2 Gig, even this amount of Ram makes no difference as the memory does not appear to ‘purge’ correctly for some Adobe applications. Only a full restart seems to clear the memory buffers. Perhaps this is a Rosetta problem at the moment?
9/ Clean out your System Caches. Here some a good utility apps to do that:
Tiger Cache Cleaner: https://www.northernsoftworks.com/
Cocktail: https://www.maintain.se/cocktail/
Finally, if you have upgraded to 10.4.8, like we did (and many others), you will get less crashing if you downgrade to 10.4.7 by doing a complete Archive and Install.
It will not stop the crashing but it will lessen the amount of times Illustrator crashes, if that’s any help. You will of course have to do all the OS X Software Updates to 10.4.7 and update your Applications again if needed.