I can't wait to get home to try this. I installed PSE3 from my User account and authenticated with the Admin id/password. (I can't remember exactly, but I believe this capability to install something into /Applications from a non-admin user account was introduced in Panther) and I could use PSE3 just fine, but Help is inoperable.

And, by the way, therein lies the hint: Help is no longer generic HTML, it is a customized version of Opera.

So far, my initial satisfaction with PSE3 is decidedly negative. Sure, it does a few more things than Graphic Converter, but it does everything in a more difficult and less intuitive way. Fortunately, if I get my rebates done correctly, it won't have been too costly a mistake.

I don't think so.

If I recall correctly, the only thing that must be publicly-accessible to non-admin users is the folder /Applications/Adobe Photoshop Elements 2/Previews (and all its contents).

Setting this folder and its contents to be all-writable will do the trick.

I completely agree that changing ownership or permissions helps to undermine the security that administrator privileges provides. I'm a 21-year Unix user, and I never run as admin. It concerns me that many of my clients routinely run as admin, because that's the way Apple sets them up.

That said, what we have with Elements is the probability that it will fail miserably in a Fast User Switch situation. The Previews folder appears to be used to contain editing previews, created while you're "inside" an editing operation. These previews are probably temp versions of the image, deleted if you cancel the edit operation. (Or worse, they're the original, to be restored on cancel!)

Why is this a problem? Let's say I'm running Elements and I go into an edit. You come along, use FUS to switch to your account, fire up Elements and do the same thing. You finish your edit and logout, so I can resume. What happens to my preview? Is it your image? Is it still mine? Is it corrupted by some combination of our image data?

I haven't tried this.

Bad...really, really bad. This is the classic "multithread violation" that occurs within a program, when one has a single copy of a global variable and multiple threads that run through the code simultaneously. Only here it's happening on a "meta" level---with global files.

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EMOJO: mojo no longer workin'

I suspect there is a better way to do this that makes the application usable by all of the different non-admin users that may use the machine.

I got the PhotoShop Elements Help to work for all non-admin users by adjusting permissions as follows (you will need to be root to make these changes):

chmod -R o+x "/Applications/Adobe Photoshop Elements 3/Photoshop Elements Help.app"

chmod o+rw-x "/Applications/Adobe Photoshop Elements 3/Photoshop Elements Help.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera.app/Contents/Resources/Styles/user.css"

chmod o+rw-x "/Applications/Adobe Photoshop Elements 3/Photoshop Elements Help.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera.app/Contents/Resources/Styles/browser.css"

The hints posted here will work to get PSE running, but it's pretty extreme, and potentially unsafe, to modify the ownership and permissions of for the entire application packages. I've posted more precise instructions for making minimal changes to a minimal number files and folders to get PSE3 working properly for non-admin users.

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=237093

And harder to fix too. The problem I see is that whenever a different user uses Photoshop Elements, they start periodically seeing pop up messages that some unspecified file could not be modified and to check in the finder to see if it is locked. These happen even if it is just sitting there doing nothing. You click OK, and then a little while later you get the same message. Repeat. I'm fairly sure the files in question are the cache files. The problem is you can't just change the ownership and/or privileges of the cache files, because the next time a different user uses PE3, they overwrite the cache files, and then they are owned by them and not modifiable by anyone else. So even admin users end up having the problem. I run into this annoyance a lot because I've set up a 2nd account that I'm using for a slide scanning project which I want to have its own iPhoto library. So whenever I switch to one or the other user, I see the damnable pop-up error messages.

It's hard to believe that Adobe doesn't yet get OS X and the concept of multiple users. Those cache files should be in the users own directories, not in the application folder! I still really like Photoshop Elements 3, because it is a powerful tool (and the smart fix feature is just plain amazing IMHO), but they really need to get this right with Photoshop Elements 4 if they expect me to upgrade to it once that is out. PE4 better be a *real* OS X application.

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I took PSE 3.0 back, rather than fight with it. I left a note at Adobe about my displeasure and I found the link to "Macnn" and saved the directions. Since then, I have been e-mailing to a gentleman who says "they (Adobe) inform me that there is no problem whatsoever with PS elements 3 as indicated by your chat group." I had sent him the Macnn page but also told him of "macosxhints". If referencing either "hints" or "Macnn", "the chat group you are reading just doesn't understand how the Mac works." Now you know where we are placed. I can never say that running a Macintosh is boring. I may be "low on the pole" but is is educational. Enjoy.

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hamish