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.