Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection – An Installation Nightmare

If you’re having installation problems with CS3 skip to the end of this entry to find a likely fix

So after much waiting I got my hands on the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection. Oh yes. Yeah, sure, I only really do web work, but if there’s a choice between top end product and not top end product, I’m going for top end. I don’t want none of that Web Premium rubbish. 20GB Master Collection for me!

I’d heard through the grape vine that the installation process would take a few hours of my time, so rather than spend an evening giving it a shot I thought I’d wait until the weekend so that if it messed up I had time to fix it. Did it mess up? Oh heck yes it messed up. Here’s how things went down.

Early Saturday afternoon I begin the install. The first thing that happens is a nice message telling me to close down Firefox and Windows Live Messenger if I want to continue the install. Um…no? Oh. The installer won’t proceed unless I do. Ok, fine. I’ve go nothing to do while it installs but whatever. Those are closed. I choose to install everything, and click go. It’s off! Disc 1/4 is installing. Hooray!

Two or so hours pass and the install has nearly finished. I sit there waiting. Bing, it’s done. 21 items installed correctly. But what’s this “2 items failed to install”. One of those oddly title Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection. That doesn’t sound good. But maybe it’s ok. I load up Dreamweaver. Licensing for this product has stopped working. Uninstall and reinstall the product… etc. Maybe it’s not ok. I run the setup exe to see if I can just reinstall the bits that didn’t install last time. I can, but that still takes an hour plus to complete. Slowest installer in history? I vote yes.

Success? Well, it reinstalled fine, but I still get the licensing error. Hmm. It’s at this point I decide, for some bizarre reason, that I feel like formatting and reinstalling Windows. Why not, right? Saturday is a write off, might as well do something productive. It’s been taking a while to boot up recently anyway and a reinstall is as quick as a defrag+scan disc+various other scans anyways. So off I go. Done and dusted and off to bed.

Sunday morning bright and early! Finish off the last few bits of getting my files back, and it’s time to try again. Firefox closed, Messenger closed, setup running, another 2-3 hours pass… 11 items installed ok, the rest failed. This list of failed items happens to include Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop etc etc. You know, the actual software I want to use. Unsuprisingly frustration is rising. Perhaps if I install each item individually! Run setup, choose Dreamweaver – GO! What is it doing? Why is it reinstalling all of the shared components too? That’s what takes the longest! GAH! 1 hour+ passes. Dreamweaver plus shared components is installed successfully! Yes! Run Dreamweaver – “Licesning blah blah”.

Poo.

Now might be a time to investigate further. Google will help me. Google helps me! I find a link to an Adobe Technote in Adobe support (probably the first place I should have looked) detailing various installation problems. Most of it is junk about checking system requirements, except for:

3. Install Creative Suite 3 in a simplified mode from the desktop.
Software and services that load automatically with Windows (for example, virus protection utilities) can conflict with the Creative Suite 3 installer and cause problems in Creative Suite 3. To prevent conflict, reinstall Creative Suite 3 while Windows is in simplified mode…

Sounds promising! That might fix the install issues. What about the licensing message? This time I was led toward a thread on the Adobe Support Forums with lots of people having the same issue. A few posts down someone mentioned technote kb401528.

When you start any Adobe Creative Suite 3 application, you see the error message, “Licensing for this product has stopped working. You cannot use this product at this time. You must repair the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling this product or contacting your IT administrator or Adobe customer support for help.” You might also see the error message: “The licensing subsystem has failed catastrophically.” When you installed Creative Suite, you may have received errors about shared components failing to install.
Details
You may have received errors about shared components failing to install.

That sounds about right to me! Maybe we’re onto something here. I follow the instructions carefully. Uninstall the leftovers of my CS3 install, run the CSCleaner, run the Miscrosoft cleaner. Then I go back to the previous technote about running Windows with everything off. Follow those instructions, run the installer, find something else to do for a few hours.
Late Sunday afternoon, the installer has finished. EVERYTHING INSTALLED SUCCESSFULLY! Just one final test. Load up Dreamweaver… IT WORKS! 30 hours of screwing around with my computer and it is finally all up and running. I am drained, I am pissed, but I am not beaten. Fuck you Adobe, I win.

Here’s a summary of what to do if you’re having installation problems with Creative Suite 3:
1) Uninstall any copies of Creative Suite you might be running. 1, 2, 3 betas. Whatever, just get rid of them. Back up anything you need first. though.
2) Follow the instructions in this technote. I only needed to do points 1. Point 2 didn’t bring up any Adobe entries so I didn’t run it. Point 5 is expanded upon below.
3) Follow the instructions for point number 3 in this technote.
4) Run the installer. Wait for hours. Rejoice.

John Robinson - designer, developer, coder... John’s not quite sure exactly how he should be labelled. Why not check out his blog and make a decision for yourself. He mostly talks about CSS, jQuery and the crazy world of the Interwebs, with a little bit of personal life thrown in for good measure.