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OK, my problem this time is a Blue and white G3 running Mac OS 9.2.2. My user is telling me that whenever she uses a certain tool of a certain size in a certain area of the picture in photoshop, the computer comes up with a rectangle white screen with a bomb in the upper-left hand side of this box and it says that there was a fatal error in finder. This causes me to have to reboot the machine. I have ran an older Norton Utilities (it boots into os 9 from cd boot) and disk doctor only finds one file that is bad. It doesn't fix it, so I ran speed disk and this is my other problem...Speed disk always crashes in the same spot. I get a white rectangle box with absolutely nothing in it. It's like the system decided to draw the box and didn't feel like drawing anything else inside of it. I have another user who's going to need that machine next wednesday. Any and all help/comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

first, NEVER run Speed Disk until you know the HD is flawless. Run Disk Doctor or Mac Disk Repair FIRST.

Your description suggests the data file is corrupted causing memory to be over written.

Get the HD repaired first,
delete the Graphics file that causes the problem

you 'should be' ok from there on.

First off, thanks for responding.

Second: It's not one graphics file, it's several...almost every one we use and they are located on a network drive, not the mac hard drive.

Third: The file that disk doctor finds isn't a very important file, does this really matter that much?

ok, i give, what file? (and where is it located).

are all systems Macs or is the a mixed environment?

does the 'FILE' have a unique FONT that ONLY it is referencing?

Like I said, these are multiple photoshop files that this is happening with, not just one. They all reside on an NT 4 sp 6a server, and yes the files are on a mac volume on the server thanks to Mac Services for NT.

This is a mixed environment with windows making the majority. It's our graphics design dept with the only 2 macs. One is OS 9.2.2 and the other is 8.6.x. The 8.6 machine doesn't have photoshop, so that isn't something I've been able to do to test if it's the files or the hard drive.

The fonts are not unique to any one document...in fact at the time of crashing, it's been strictly pictures and no text.

I was able to find out what causes the problem from my user, so here is to shed light on this:
Just before the system(finder, not photoshop) crashes, she is using the Eraser tool at a size of 200 in the bottom left hand corner of the picture. As soon as she clicks there, finder crashes.

I also took your advice to use rescue disk and it didn't find anything wrong. However, when I quit the application (rescue disk) the system froze at the watch. I left it for a few minutes hoping, but then just restarted the machine.

Now, because of my extremely limited knowledge of macs my next question is built around my windows experience....Could this be a failing hard drive?