For those of you who are planning to upgrade to Photoshop CS3, or any of the CS3 products (Flash, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, etc) then your in for the ride of your life.

I've spent 24 hours trying to get the beast to work and finally have got it working, so thought I would post a thread to let everyone else know how to resolve some particular issues to upgrading to the latest version when your running on 64bit version of Vista.

I do expect that similar problems will occur for some of the other platforms, however it seems that the 64 bit version of Vista is what the Adobe products have the highest amount of problems with.

The first question is, have you downloaded and installed the trail version of any CS3 products? I highly recommend that you do not do this if you plan to buy the software. If you have then you need to uninstall it before you run the upgrade.

When the upgrade runs if you get your computer freezing, rebooting, finishing with cryptic messages that the install had errors but not saying what the errors are, then you have a problem with old Adobe files left behind.



Now the course of action is dependant on whether your a full release install or an upgrade.

In both cases you need to clean your computer of all residual files left on your computer. This should first be performed by uninstalling via the standard windows uninstall program. Next you will need to clean your computer, the best way is via the Adobe CS3Clean Script. Download this zip file, unzip and run the CS3Clean.exe as administrator (right mouse click the exe and choose "Run as Administrator"). When it asks you what options I would recommend ignoring option 1 and 2 and choose the hidden options 3 and 4. 3 will remove everything other than browser plugins, 4 will remove everything (I could be wrong about option 3, but four is without a doubt a remove anything that is adobe).

Now you need to run this multiple times, until it reports that there is nothing to delete. If you keep getting directories that it cannot remove then that means you have files which are owned by some special install account and that even though you run as administrator you cannot delete. You need to delete these otherwise the install will fail. So if you type in cmd at the search prompt in the start menu:



Instead of just hitting enter, try using control shift enter at the same time, this runs the command shell in administrator mode.

Now you need to check out several directories, they are:

  
• C:Program Files (x86)Adobe
  
• C:Program Files (x86)Common FilesAdobe
  
• C:Program Files (x86)Common FilesAdobe Systems Shared
  
• C:ProgramDataAdobe
  
• C:ProgramDataAdobe Systems

Some of the above are only created if you install the trail version of CS3 or if you have an install that failed and your cleaning up. Normally the uninstall will clear out most and the WinCS3Clean will clear out the rest, but when you have permission issues then you have to do it manually.

Now the command to delete a directory and all subdirectories is:

rmdir /s <directory>

Where <directory> is the directory you wish to delete. If you get a permission error then you need to add permissions to your account and then grant yourself full access to the directory. The two commands are:

takeown /f <filename>

cacls <filename> /G <username>:F

With the takeown command you can use the /R option to perform the operation recursively.

With the cacls command you can use the /T option to perform the operation recursively.

The problem with the cacls command is that you need to know what your user name is (this is the /G <username> option). Mine is "METALSKIN-IMetalSkin" because my computer name is METALSKIN-I and my account is MetalSkin. Now you can find out the name of your account by typing in the command:

whoami

This will report to you who you are.

Now once you have granted yourself full access to the files you can now delete the files via the rmdir /s command I mentioned above.

Now if your a full release then you can go straight ahead and install, however if you happen to be performing an upgrade then you have a couple of issues to sort out first.

If you have your prior version of Adobe product licensed on another box then you need to remove that license from that computer. You can do this by running the Adobe product on that PC, selecting under the help menu the Deactivate option and follow the prompts. This will not remove the software from that computer but will stop you from using it.

If you removed all Adobe software from your target install box then you need to install the old version before you install the upgrade. You will not find this mentioned anywhere in the doco or on the Adobe web site, but trial and error has taught me this. You also have to make certain it is activated. If you install your CS3 product and get the following error:



Then I can tell you that this is caused by not having the older version activated on your box before you install the new CS3. I just love the error message, doesn't tell you this at all!

The only other issue you will come across is if your installing Adobe Acrobat 8. The install on the 64 bit version of Vista (and I believe this is a problem under XP 64 as well) is that it tries to install a dll that is 32bit and generates an error saying it cannot find the dll. Unfortunately I didn't get a screen shot of this problem and avoided it all together by not installing it, as I don't care for Acrobat (have no need to install it). But the solution is to choose the browse option, go up one directory and you will see a 64 bit driver directory. Under this directory is the dll you need and then the install should continue as normal.

One point that will assist is if you copy all the files of the install disk onto your computer, I found this a lot faster to install than installing from the install disk. Another action I took was to go under the CS3 directory and run the setup program, I avoided the autoplay.exe command in the root directory as this will also install Adobe Reader 8, which can cause problems with access to files in other places outside of the adobe install directories.

Hope this helps anyone else who is battling with installing CS3. God knows it was a pain in the ass for me.