European clock change causes Dreamweaver CS3 crashes

The Dreamweaver forums have been ablaze with reports of simple PHP and ASP code causing Dreamweaver CS3 to crash. I have tested many of the sample code snippets, and can confirm that CS3 is crashing on Windows XP and Vista, but not on Mac OS X. It also affects the PHP code in my books.

The cause of the crashes appears to be the clock change following the end of summer time in Europe. Since the United States is still on daylight saving time until 4 November, American users have reported that they are crash-free—for the time being, at least. It’s not clear whether it’s an Adobe bug or one caused by the Windows operating system, but there’s little point getting into the blame game. What’s needed is a fix—and quickly.

The temporary solution appears to be to change your system clock back to any time before 2 am on 28 October. Alternatively, use Dreamweaver 8.0.2, which isn’t affected. Neither solution is ideal, but Adobe has been alerted to the problem, and hopefully a permanent solution can be found soon.

[Update]: The solution is to delete WinFileCache-********.dat, which was apparently corrupted by the clock change.

This entry was posted in Dreamweaver, PHP. Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to European clock change causes Dreamweaver CS3 crashes

  1. Interestingly I have not been affected by this bug, I was working in Dreamweaver when the clocks changed and for several hours afterwards so maybe that has affected whether the bug strikes or not ?

  2. Khan says:

    I confirm, the problem is solved by setting back the clock to some day in October.
    DW CS3 does not crash when starting with new pages, it also does not crash when one opens simple recordset pages. It crashes when complex design and recordset based pages are opened.
    I am not sure if it has to do something with WINXP, adobe hasn’t been stable in this transition process, so God knows, hope they come up with a solution soon.

  3. David says:

    The solution is simple, and was posted on Monday 29 October. Delete WinFileCache-********.dat in your Configuration folder.

  4. Christa says:

    I am on a MAC OSX 10.4 and DreamweaverCS3 has started crashing no matter what i do. I might be open for 30 secs. before the program crashes. It all started when i was messing around with the Spry function & CSS properties – now i can’t even maintain my site. I have always had little issues with crashing but this is ridiculous!

  5. Jeff says:

    I just tried add some php: above the html element on a cs3 dreamweaver page in OS X 10.5 and it crashes everytime.

  6. kathy says:

    I am on a MAC OSX 10.4 and Dreamweaver CS3 has started crashing when I open a file, leave nothing left to do but submit the crash report. The file opens and after 10 seconds, it crashes. I