How about that eh? I found no reference to any problem like this online, but I found a fix myself so I’m posting it in case some unfortunate soul encounters the same problem. It’s really quite easy.
The Problem
This was one of the stranges bugs I’ve ever seen. I’ve been using Dreamweaver 9 on my work pc running WinXP for the last 4 months without any trouble. All of a sudden, it started crashing yesterday when I typed an opening curly brace in a PHP script ({).
It was fine if I was typing it in a javascript file. It was even fine if I just typed the { in notepad and then pasted it into the PHP script. But if I typed it, bang, dreamweaver crashes.
The Fix
So I figured if DW had been fine up to now, then the bug must be coming from some data that I had generated. This under WinXP this stuff lives in Application Data under Docs & Settings. I moved the Dreamweaver 9 directory from C:\Documents and Settings\my_user_directory\Application Data\Adobe out onto my desktop.
Starting up Dreamweaver recreates the directory with it’s own defaults, naturally my workspace and other any other personal settings I had were reset, but the bug is gone now.
If you wanted you could drag stuff back in from the isolated Dreamweaver 9 preferences directory to get back most of your preferences one at a time and see which one was causing the problem.
I’m not going to bother. It’s working now, I didn’t have that many preferences set up.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:31 am
I had the same problem – turns out you don’t need to delete the whole directory, just the WinFileCache-AD76BB20.dat file within the Configuration directory. See http://www.adobe.com/go/kb402776
April 9th, 2008 at 4:02 am
I had the same problem, thanks for both the article for addressing the issue, and the comment for the more specific fix. I deleted WinFileCache-AD76BB20.dat and it works perfectly again.
Thanks again
November 15th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Thanks for this and the link by blade. Absolutely fixed my problem..
November 2nd, 2010 at 10:56 am
Thanks for posting this fix!
January 1st, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Same problem in Dreamweaver CS5 starting New Year’s Day 2011 (?). This fix worked for Dreamweaver CS5 as well. Thanks!
June 6th, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Hi there:
I ran into this problem a couple of months ago and following everyone instructions and adobe suggestions fixed the problems back then.
I ran into this again last friday and since then I couldn’t use Dreamweaver to code PHP. I tried deleting the Dreamweaver configuration folder and just Win-File-Cache file and nothing works.
It seems like this problem only works once, at least by my end.
Lamentably the operating system used at work is Win XP, yeah I know, what a shame!
I tried to find another solution but no other has been found! Right Now I’m using Oracle NetBeans 7.0 as a temporary solution and it’s really annoying because it almost takes the software 20 minutes to scan the project and freeze out my computer while doing it.
Does anyone has another solution to this problem or maybe an idea what’s causing it!
June 6th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Well, I found the solution of the problem I posted!
The file I was working on were corrupted when Dreamweaver originally crashes and even though DW were able to open it couldn’t save on it. What I did was to create a new file, copy and pasted the whole code in the new file, the closed the corrupted file and save as the new file the original file (the corrupted one).
I tried first to save the original file as another file but the problem persist. For any reason DW recognized the file as the corrupted one. But if you do as I mentioned the problem will be solved!
January 5th, 2012 at 6:24 pm
Thanks! I ran into this problem with CS3 running on Windows 7 and I think the solutions posted have fixed the problem. I had to both delete the dat file and copy and paste the content of the file I was working on into a new file. There are a couple of differences to note with Windows 7 and I think Vista. The path to the configuration file is:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
The dat file is called WinFileCache-4DD32B57.dat
Also, if you happen to run into this problem when you have not saved in a while and you really don’t want to loose what you were working on, I found that if I left my computer for half an hour or so Dreamweaver would finally produce an error message and then let me save the file I was working on. I did then have to restart Dreamweaver but I did not loose what I was working on. Of course it may also have been that save that caused me to have to copy and paste my work into a new file to get around Dreamweaver’s corruption of the file. This work-around may well not work on older less stable operating systems.