because of program error

My copy of Photoshop Elements for the Mac started behaving erratically
when trying to open files or create new ones. This seems to have been
due to file system problems on my hard disk as booting to single
usermode and running fsck has fixed the problem.

Errors coming back from Photoshop were:

"Could not complete your request because of a program error"

for opening an existing file, and:

"Could not create a new document because of a program error"

for creating new files.

The Adobe tech document which references these errors:

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/331627.html

Solution 4 advises that you boot into single user mode and run fsck -fy

Instructions for how to do this can be found on:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

The basic steps to resolve this were:

1. run Apple's Disk Utility (found in Applications/Utilities/Disk
Utility -if it comes back with errors that it cannot repair, go to step
two. If no errors are found, the problem is probably something else, in
which case, read the adobe tech doc above and try another solution.

2. boot the mac holding down the 'apple' and 's' key.

3. once the kernel has booted into single user, and you have the
command prompt, type:
/sbin/fsck -fy
- fsck will then check the file system, and hopefully repair the
damage. If it still can't repair the disk, try booting from the Mac
OS X Install CD and running the disk utility from there.

Hope this helps anyone experiencing the same problem in future!

--
Marc L. de Bruijn