One of the big things I’ve been dealing with at work over the past couple of weeks is installation issues for Adobe Creative Suite 3. It’s a very cool and powerful set of applications for graphics, publishing, and other functions. However, it is by far one of the slowest and at times, most painful installations I have had to deal with. Past the jump. I’ll go over a couple of blog sites and tools that have helped me in the pursuit to fix the problem.
Two blog sites have proven to be highly effective for me in fixing the problem:
- This post detailing this user’s “CS3 Horror” actually led me to a couple of tools that have been a lifesaver with properly removing all bits of Adobe software from your machine should you have an issue with CS3, which is a lifesaver and a very necessary tool. CS3Clean (which requires Microsoft’s Windows Installer Cleanup utility) is the script that puts it all into motion. The two options that you see help with cleaning old parts of Creative Suite 3 out, but what I have had to do (since we’re uninstalling CS2, and installing CS3) is use the undocumented Option 4, which removes ALL Adobe products.
- What brought on all this madness for me? A bug I must have uncovered when I made one of my Acrobat 7.0.8 administrative installations, the Error 1406 problem. The problem happens when an installation bug wrecks the registry permissions of certain keys necessary for Acrobat, leaving many as read-only to everyone, and not editable by anyone, even locked from being changed by administrators or programs. There is a file here that will hopefully automate the process of fixing it, but should that not work, it outlines the process of changing these permissions yourself. You can also use a tool like CCleaner to delete the keys once all of the products have been uninstalled, and you know if it won’t remove the registry keys that an issue is in place.
The entire process takes, gasp, three to four hours. I told ya, these installations are SLOW. But, it does leave a system much cleaner and more efficient for the future.
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