Hello adobebody,

A year ago I experienced the same problem. Thought I?d lost my Freehand
forever until I stumbled across a solution.

Here?s a post I later made to someone that was having a similar problem. I
will reprint the whole thing instead of trying to edit it to fit your
situation. And pardon me if this fix has already been suggested.

Good luck getting your Freehand back!
-----------------------------------------

I may be able to help. On Monday morning my Freehand 11.0.2 went into a coma,
exhibiting the same symptoms you describe, with the added feature of Photoshop
(9.0.2) going bad after everytime I attempted to launch FH. Only a restart
would get PS going again. Freehand -- nothing would get it going.

I spent a good part of 2.5 days trying every trick I know to get the damn
thing to launch with no success. I reinstalled Freehand, Photoshop and Mac OS
X 10.4.10 combo updater, more than once; ran Disk Utility, DiskWarrior and Onyx
multiple times; deleted and/or replaced with older versions from my backup
drive, many different .plist (preferences) files; and a whole bunch of other
stuff suggested on Mac help sites. Including from Adobe:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...8933&sliceId=1

Which didn?t work for me, but you should try it. Who knows?

Anyways, still no FH but looking at the Activity Monitor ( FINDER > Go >
Utilities > Activity Monitor ) I discovered that whenever I tried to launch FH
it stalled (and became an ?inactive process?) and another process called
?AuthenticationSe? led the list for CPU usage but did nothing and the computer
had to be restarted to regain stability -- stable except for the FH problem of
course.

So an ?Authentication? issue, and the activation glitch mentioned in the Adobe
link above, eventually led me to the solution (won?t get into the how and the
why because I really don?t know).

Unfortunately this requires that you have a backup of your system from back
when Freehand still worked. If you don?t, sorry about that -- hopefully the
HotFix above worked, or someone else has a suggestion based on the following
idea:

Restart your computer, repair permissions, verify your disk, repair disk if
necessary, standup and shout FREEHAND ROCKS, restart again, then....

Uncover a folder called ?Product Licenses? on your startup drive.

Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences > Macrovision > Safecast > Product
Licenses

The folder looks empty, but there?s got to be something important inside that
you can?t see. Replace the Product Licenses folder on your startup drive with
the Product Licenses folder from the same location on your backup drive or disk
(from when FH worked). Maybe don?t let the folder on the startup drive get
overwritten by the older version, but remove it to the desktop -- just in case
you need to put it back.

Now try to launch Freehand. If this works you?ll get the startup screen (yay)
and the message that you need to activate your software and you?ll be taken to
an Adobe registration page and there you go.

Good luck.

I had to shout FREEHAND ROCKS 15 times, that did the trick. No, seriously,
since I've deleted too many folders in the beginning, only formatting the HDD
helped.
Take this Adobe, I took hours of installing so many apps (including the
incredibly slow and tedious CS3 install) and losing many prefs into account
only to install the app you see no reason to support anymore. Can't see me
doing that for Illustrator.

Then I applied all the updates and then reinstalled FH. The folder Macintosh
HD > Library > Preferences > Macrovision > Safecast > Product Licenses is not
empty, there is an invisible file there, which is very important.

Now I *think* I know of all files that are created during the FH install, and
backed them up, but I am still afraid to install the QuickTime update... Not to
mention 10.5.5 coming out in a few days...

I had to shout FREEHAND ROCKS 15 times, that did the trick. No, seriously,
since I've deleted too many folders in the beginning, only formatting the HDD
helped.
Take this Adobe, I took hours of installing so many apps (including the
incredibly slow and tedious CS3 install) and losing many prefs into account
only to install the app you see no reason to support anymore. Can't see me
doing that for Illustrator.

Then I applied all the updates and then reinstalled FH. The folder Macintosh
HD > Library > Preferences > Macrovision > Safecast > Product Licenses is not
empty, there is an invisible file there, which is very important.

Now I *think* I know of all files that are created during the FH install, and
backed them up, but I am still afraid to install the QuickTime update... Not to
mention 10.5.5 coming out in a few days...