Photoshop CC 2019: Hangs on reading preferences when launching

Howdy Julie,

What kind and how many fonts do you have on your system?  A bad font could mess up enumeration on launch.  Web-fonts from 3rd parties are the most common offenders (Klingon, Elvish, Dwarvish Runes, etc) though we do sometimes see issues with Arabic and Indic fonts as well.

My recommendations would be:

a) trash your preferences on launch and try again.  The problem could be a one-off and clearing prefs will rebuild your Photoshop font cache.  Takes less than five seconds extra.

b) if that doesn't work, clear your system font cache AND THEN clear your Photoshop font cache again.  Instructions for Win10 are here: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/rebuild-font-cache-in-windows and https://winaero.com/blog/rebuild-font-cache-windows-10/.  Takes maybe three or four minutes.

c) if you STILL continue to have problems after that, you very likely have a mal-formed font.  Run the script from Step #5 to identify which one: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-fonts-photoshop.html.  Remove that font and repeat step b.

If for any reason that doesn't solve your problem, please let us know here.

Thanks,
David

Have you installed the 20.0.2 update that was released this AM? If not, try first.

The other known thing that can do this are abnormally large presets. See the following for troubleshooting instructions: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/freeze-on-launch.html

I installed the update this morning and still have problems.  

Sorry I can't find any Library you are talking about. 

Yesterday I cleaned out a lot of my patterns, styles, brushes, and actions. Not sure how big is too big, but I do have a lot of them still.

I removed them from my presets manager but not from C:/ProgramFiles/Adobe/PSCC2019/Presets/patterns,styles,brushes, etc. 

Thanks David, I do appreciate it, but I’m okay with 3 minutes. I use everything daily as I create items for scrap bookers. So I am creating papers, cards, elements, styles, etc.

Julie