Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 has a small utility called the Card Reader. Whenever you connect a camera USB or insert a card in a USB card reader the Card Reader pops up and allows you to download the photos onto your local hard drive and be added to the Photoshop Elements catalog.

However unlike with previous versions this Card Reader has proved to be problematic. It does not respond properly to the Windows close event so you have to manually close it when you are hibernating or logging off or shutting down.

Also the Card Reader for reasons unclear to me prevents certain applications from installing. Again the only way to get around this problem is to close the Card Reader.

In the end the convenience of the Card Reader was not worth the problems so I turned it off. It’s my impression as well as many others (see the reviews for 4.0 and 5.0 on Amazon.com) that Adobe is continually degrading the quality and functionality of the Photoshop Elements product in every subsequent version.