I finally had success installing Adobe Creative Suite 3. I had all but given up when John Metzger, Core Technology Senior Engineering Manager for Adobe Systems read about my problems and emailed me with with possible solutions.

We exchanged a handful of emails and I sent him the install log files from my previous attempts. With that he was able to suggest a solution that worked out and helped in gathering some valuable information that will go into a tech note for other users. (Not yet published to my knowledge.)

The problem that I had was that the individual apps in CS3 would install but I got an error next to Creative Suite Web Premium and Shared Components. (You can see the error messages at the CrucialLimit.com site.) Even though the individual apps reported that they had installed I could not run them. Every time I tried I got a cryptic error message and the app shut down.

John Metzger believes it may have been a problem with, of all things, the Flash player. Here are the steps that I followed to get CS3 installed on a Windows XP machine.

1-uninstalled all the CS3 trials and all previous versions of PS and Flash and betas. This does not include Flex or ColdFusion. They have no files in common with the Adobe suite.

2-Deleted all folders under user account that had CS3 in the folder name.

3-Run the cleaner software - twice.

4-Uninstall the Flash player. (*Read below if you use Flex builder.)

5-installed CS3.

I’m sure that the teams at Adobe know that they missed the mark on this. Who knows what sort of dynamics were going on internally that lead to this. I’m going to take a shot in the dark and say that the install team knew there were serious issues, asked for more time from the powers that be but didn’t get it.

It’s hard for me to blame people who write code because I know how hard it can be especially when trying to merge code bases. Assuming any of this speculation is correct I have a message for the Adobe management: when a team tells you that the code isn’t done and they need more time you give it to them. Yeah, there’s pressure to get products out on time because of investors but those investors are going to be even more upset if you lose your core customers. You’ll probably weather it this time but you have lost some serious cred with the people who matter most to you company. Screw it up again and you’ll pay for it in the stock value.

*Note: If you use Flex builder and you have to uninstall the Flash player and you use FireFox to launch your Flex apps for debugging then you’ll want to backup your NPSWF32.dll file located in the Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/plugins/. Apparently it gets reinstalled incorrectly in the Windows/System32 folder on some non since like that. All you need to do is copy it before uninstalling the Flash player then after reinstalling the Flash player you can place it back in the FireFox plugin folder.