Adobe

After I rebuilt my Mac using the Migration Assistant, everything worked – with the exception of Adobe’s Creative Suite, CS3. Getting CS3 to work turned out to be a much bigger issue than I thought, with many hours spent digging through Adobe’s knowledgebase, their forums and on their phone. The same Migration Assistant issue exists for Adobe CS4 and can also be solved by using the steps outlined below.

In general, the problem is as follows: If you use the MacOSX Migration Assistant to migrate to a new Mac or to rebuild an existing Mac, chances are very high that you will run into the dreaded Adobe Creative Suite “Licensing for this product has stopped” issue. Even if you do not migrate your applications (as I did), the Migration Assistant migrates some of its settings, which renders the Creative Suite product unable to start. To analyze my CS3 problems, I went as far as installing a trial copy of Photoshop CS4, which would not work either. That alerted me to the fact that this was not a licensing issue for a particular CS component, but for all of Adobe’s creative suite products.

There are only two ways how to fix this issue:

1. Reinstall your Mac without the use of the Migration Assistant (only to be used as a last resort, if everything else fails)
2. Do some open-heart surgery (don’t worry – if it fails, your only alternative would have been a complete reinstall anyway)

Following are step-by-step instructions of how to get Adoce Creative Suite CS3 and CS4 to work again:

1. Make sure you have copies of your Adobe products handy, since you will need to reinstall them. Don’t start this without having the disks or files you need for reinstallation.
2. You will also need your admin/super-user password.
3. Download a copy of the Adobe Flash player, since you will lose Flash in the process. Don’t install it yet.
4. Download a copy of the Adobe CS3 clean script (there’s also one for CS4). Run it to uninstall CS3. It will delete the entire CS3 installation plus Flash.
5. Uninstall any other Adobe software – better safe than sorry.
6. Go to the following folders one at a time and delete anything that starts with “Adobe”, “Macromedia” and “FlexNet” or has it somewhere in its name:
• /Library/Application Support
• /Library/Preferences
• /Applications
• /Applications/Utilities
• ~/Library/Application Support
• Use the finder to search for Adobe, Macromedia or FlexNet. Examine every file or folder – if in doubt throw it away
7. Empty your recycling bin, so all the files are gone for sure!
8. Reboot.
9. Reinstall the Flash Player that you downloaded in Step 3.
10. Install CS3 from your install disks. Bingo, it works!
11. Install any other Adobe product that you removed.

Done! Now my Mac is fully restored!

{ Comments on this entry are closed }