I was working in Photoshop a few days back and I tried to open a file, and I got a really odd error. I assumed I had a corrupt file, so I didn’t think much of it, but I was sad that I couldn’t open the file anymore. (Today I found that the file opens wonderfully in the GIMP, yay!)

But my problems didn’t end there. I opened a new document and clicked on the text tool. I then clicked on the document to add text and instead of getting a text insertion cursor to appear, I got a helpful little comandline box which looked like this:

But that wasn’t all. I looked at my menu bar, to discover that it looked entirely out of whack:

Clicking on the Blank area gave me a cute but useless box:

Clicking on Photoshop gave me an interesting view of what was happening:

I had never heard of SOIUX, so my first instinct was to find out what it was, choosing About SIOUX gave me this:

When attempting to quit Photoshop, I was presented with a quaint little dialogue box asking me if I wanted to save my error message:

After I quit, Photoshop gave me an “Unexpected Quit” message. I was rather expecting it to quit, but aparently my system wasn’t.

The oddest thing about this error, is that I have only found one other document case of this happening It’s found in the Adobe Forums and repeated in Google Groups.This question, though, is an unresolved issue from November of 2006.

Seeing as it came from a text issue error, and remembering a message about a font not being correct at one point in time, I decided to check out my fonts to see if there were any corrupt files. I found a corrupt font, and trashed it, but the problem still exists. What baffles me is that it happens to a blank document. The best I can tell is that it is some sort of C or C++ error resulting from either a corrupt file or bad preference of some sort.

I did a search for both “Berardino E. Baratta” and “Metrowerks Corporation” but I didn’t find anything helpful in the results. I also searched for Simple Input/Output User Exchange, and got virtually nothing from Google. Recently I have become very good at searching for things Google is not able to help me with.

I think my best bet is to try out a clean install of Photoshop. Or revert to a backed copy of my hard drive. I was able to boot from my clone today and use Photoshop for my needs almost perfectly.

Remember kids, always, ALWAYS, back up important files.