This is the second time I’ve had this problem. Once with Illustrator CS3 on OSX 10.5 and now with the CS4 version running on 10.6.2.

I start up Illustrator and everything is gone, all the panels, toolbars, except for the drawing area and the Illustrator toolbar.

Ever heared of spaces, dumbass?

Like every normal person working with adobe products on a mac, you must be saying “well duuuh! Everybody knows that panels and windows dissapear all the time using spaces!”

true.

Spaces + adobe products = bad

however, in this case it was something completely different as switching through the spaces, restarting Illustrator and such didn’t solve a thing.

Oh silly you, choose an other workspace or restore your old one…

Nope, also didn’t work as the “Window” menu was completely empty. “Uhm,… say what again?”. The window menu was odd enough completely empty. So no workspace stuff

Then what was it?

After cruising the web a little bit, I found nothing. So I did what any person would do: Erase your preferences.

I’ve found the “Adobe Illustrator CS4 Settings” folder under User/Library/preferences/. I backed up all the settings and deleted the ones that were in the folder. Empty folder should create new preferences on startup. And it worked. Hooray! Everything back where it was.