Photoshop Elements, make it go away!

[vertigo]

I've tried stopping it in the app's options and turning it off via msconfig, but Photoshop Elements still starts up as a process (although only in task manager, not visibly) on boot.
Anyone have any ideas how to make it stop loading on boot, aside from uninstalling it?

[MartyG]

It's probably listed in the "Run" section of the registry. If you bring up the registry editor, search for "RunOnce", above it should be a "Run" section, this is a list of items that run on start up, you can delete these entries and the apps won't start at boot. There will be a couple of these in the different sections, so continue the search a few times.

Be careful when deleting stuff from the registry, because deleting the wrong stuff can leave you with a broken system.

[anephric]

If you don't fancy mucking about in the registry, Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel is pretty nifty.

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

[vertigo]

MartyG, I think that's the same thing you affect when you edit the startup stuff in msconfig, but no, it's not listed there either!
It's PhotoshopElementsFileAgent.exe if that's any help. It appears in the folder HKEY Local Machine/System/ControlSet001/Services/AdobeActiveFileMonitor which isn't an obvious startup location in the registry, so I'm not happy about deleting it from there.
The other entries are the same thing replicated in ControlSet002 and CurrentControlSet, with event logs for each one, so there are 6 instances of that file name in my registry in total.
Any further ideas?

[EvilBoris]

got a shortcut in the start menu : programs : startup?

it might do

delete it if it has

[MartyG]

Ah - sounds like it might be a Windows service entry then.

Goto: Control Panel->Admin Tools->Services

See if you can see it in the list and set the start-up to disabled.

[vertigo]

That could be it, I've switched the one that it looks likeliest to be onto Manual startup and stopped the process in that screen too, hopefully that'll sort it. Cheers.

Hmm, it had the interesting side effect of killing my internet connection. Stupid Adobe.

[chis]

You don't need to do ANY registry hacking for this. Go to Start -> Run -> "services.msc", or right-click on My Computer and go to Manage -> Services.

Find two services, stop them, then disable them: Adobe Active File Monitor and Photoshop Elements Device Connect.

Note that I'm running Elements v3, other versions may have different/more/less services.