Hey kids, this is definitely one of the weirdest bugs I have ever clapped eyes on.

Not for the first time, I was happily authoring CSS and Dreamweaver CS3 crashed. Turns out, it doesn’t have to be specifically CSS, but that was my situation anyway.

The crash

Something feels a little too familiar: this is DW after all, and those of us who have used it from the start will know the pedigree. But I try to restart the program anyway: it’s 1am and I don’t need this. Nope, fail. There it is, unequivocal and painfully blunt: Dreamweaver CS3 won’t start on Windows XP.

The following options were available:

• Abuse someone at Adobe
• Reinstall Dreamweaver
• Try to clean out my config files so that Dreamweaver has to create new ones on restart (an old and occasionally successful solution)

And the answer? None of the above.

Here we are with this veritable portent of disaster: in these times of quad processors and 32-bit colour, has the long-exorcised ghost of DW’s buggy past returned to haunt us?

Sort of, but the fix turned out to be simple, if somewhat obscure. I shall elaborate in a moment, but first I must attribute my source. In August 2007, Adobe Community Expert and author David Powers solved this profoundly ugly problem in the Macromedia.Dreamweaver Google Group.