Feb 23 2011
InDesign CS5 Crash at Startup: Don’t SING
A student brought her MacBook to class and asked me to troubleshoot her new install of CS5. It would lock up when starting up, with the SBBD (Spinning Beach Ball of Death). I tried resetting preferences, to no avail. She had no third-party plug-ins, no font auto-activation — none of the common culprits. It was a clean install.
Poking through the Adobe forums, though, I came across a thread on the same problem. One poster found that deleting the SING.InDesignPlugin cured the problem.
Sure enough, that did the trick! She is now SBBD-free, and InDesign launches and runs with no problem. I didn’t have this problem on either my desktop Mac or my laptop, so I don’t know why it affects some folks but not others. But I’m passing it on in hopes it will help others.
The plug-in is here:
Applications> Adobe> InDesign CS5> Plug-Ins> Text> SING.InDesignPlugin
The forum thread is here (search for the poster “lipstickdesign”):
http://forums.adobe.com/message/3024920
Yes! Isn’t that weird? I just discovered this a few days ago, because someone tweeted about it and included a link to the Technote that helped them:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/408/kb408816.html
That was news to me. Wonder if it’s a CS5 thing only.
While poking around Tech Notes, discovered this supremely helpful one:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/840/cpsid_84010.html
I didn’t find any references to CS4, but then, I didn’t dig any deeper. And I don’t know if it’s a Mac-only thing, either.
But that other Tech Note… Wow, sorta Zen, eh? I’m assuming that you clicked the “NO” radio button
[...] Help > Starter search for recent Adobe Tech Notes on InDesign > Tech Note on SING error and Claudia McCue’s post about it > Nigel French’s web site, his Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign book, [...]