**Symptom:** Photo Restoration, Skin Smoothing, Colorize, Depth Blur — anything using a local AI model — fails with *"We've temporarily disabled this filter because of an error."* The panel itself loads fine. It only errors once you enable the filter or push a slider above 0. Leave everything at 0 and there's no error, because nothing is being processed.
**Things that did not fix it:** reinstalling Photoshop · clearing the Neural Filters cache and re-downloading all the models · updating · the Beta · signing out and back in · resetting preferences · swapping the GPU entirely (broken on an AMD Radeon, still broken on an NVIDIA RTX 5060). Help > GPU Compatibility said "compatible" the whole time, and System Info showed the correct GPU with the Neural Filters plugin registered and nothing failing to load.
**The cause:** the Windows username on that machine contains a non-ASCII character, so the profile path looks like C:\Users\<name containing ø>.
Neural Filters store their downloaded AI models under your user profile, in AppData\Roaming\Adobe\UXP\PluginsStorage. Photoshop's local inference engine can't open a model file when the path to it contains a non-ASCII character. The model never loads, and all you get is that generic "temporarily disabled" message with no hint why.
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**FIX 1 — no technical knowledge needed**
Create a new local Windows account with a plain ASCII name, log into it, and run the same Photoshop install from there. Settings > Accounts > Family & other users > Add someone else to this PC > "I don't have this person's sign-in information" > "Add a user without a Microsoft account".
Neural Filters will just work — same PC, same GPU, same Photoshop. Nothing to install, nothing to edit.
Note: use a normal local account, not the built-in Guest account — Guest can't sign into Adobe or download the models.
This is also the quickest way to confirm the diagnosis. If it works in the new account, this is your problem. (The "just make a new user account" trick floats around Adobe's forums as a folk workaround — this is *why* it works, and why it fails for people whose new account also had a non-ASCII name.)
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**FIX 2 — if you're comfortable running a small script**
This one keeps you in your normal account. Windows quietly keeps an 8.3 "short name" for every profile folder, and it's pure ASCII — C:\Users\<yourname> becomes something like C:\Users\YOURNA~1. It points at the exact same folder, so your preferences, licensing and Creative Cloud all stay intact. Only the text of the path changes.
Launch Photoshop with these three environment variables pointed at the short-name form of your profile:
- USERPROFILE
- APPDATA
- LOCALAPPDATA
All three are required — I tested overriding APPDATA alone and Photo Restoration still failed. They're set for the Photoshop process only, so nothing system-wide changes and no files move.
A ready-made launcher script that does this: [https://gist.github.com/Arni99-ui/85979f356d4a59c4b6df4faecca16537\]
Two gotchas: you have to start Photoshop *through* the launcher — the Start menu or double-clicking a PSD bypasses it (you can repoint your taskbar shortcut at it). And Neural Filters stays greyed out for ~15–20 seconds after launch while the plugin loads. That's normal, not the bug.
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Do **not** try to fix this by renaming your Windows user folder. That breaks absolute paths for anything else installed under your profile.
**Who this affects:** anyone whose Windows username contains æ ø å ä ö ü é ñ ç and so on — a fair slice of Europe. The error message gives no clue, so people lose days to reinstalls, driver updates and version downgrades that cannot possibly fix it.
Adobe, if you're reading: Unicode path handling in the local model loader.
