How to fix slow startup for old Photoshop/Premiere Elements apps (on Windows)

Summary: Easy way to fix slow startup issues for older versions of Adobe products (on Windows).

If you have an older version of Adobe video and photo editing products, such as Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements, you may be irritated with the long startup time, which could take several minutes. Apparently, the applications try to connect to a server that is no longer in service (btw, excellent job, Adobe!), so they wait... and wait... and wait... The good thing is that there seems to be an easy fix for this.

According to the answer to this post, you just need to add the following entry to your hosts file located in the %WINDIR%\System32\Drivers\Etc folder:

127.0.0.1   static.photoshop.com

This solved the problem form my Photoshop Elements 9 and Premiere Elements 13 instances running on Windows 7 (yeah, I know, need to upgrade to Windows 10, but that's a different story).

Enjoy!