Photoshop cs4 stoped responding...

I'm a graphic design student, and I had gotten adobe photoshop cs4 a few months ago and recently I have been having issues when I'm trying to work in the program.

I'll create a new image and I can open a file afterwards, but if I try to open another file it stops responding and it has to close.

It also stops responding when I try to save as... as image.

Is there a way to get it working properly without going out of my way in a time consuming method of trying to save and create new files to not have it stop working?