I thought I’d post this little note about the hassles I’ve had recently with the installation of Photoshop CS3, which my company purchased as an upgrade from Photoshop 7.

I was pretty excited to get the new version since we were 3 versions behind on the latest release. After I got approval to purchase the software, I went through the online ordering process on Adobe’s website. Everything went well with this part of the process, but soon I would end up in the installation hell that is Photoshop CS3 (and apparently the other CS3 products from Adobe).

Once the download was finished, I started the “setup.exe” program and watched as the progress bar went to 100%. Then, nothing. No installer. So, I tried running the installer again. This time I got an error saying that I could only install one Adobe product at a time. So, after searching the Internet for solutions to the problem, I found that I wasn’t the only one having issues with the Adobe software.

I ran through some of the procedures on a test computer which led me to downloading a program called WinCS3Clean that removes Adobe software from the registry as well as from the file system. This program also required having the Microsoft Windows Installer Clean Up utility installed.

To get the Clean program to work, I had to instruct it to remove all Adobe and Macromedia products. Also, you must run it multiple times to make sure to remove everything. Then, finally the installer worked on my test computer.

However, this was not the end of my troubles. I called Adobe’s tech support to find out if there was an easier way to get CS3 installed on my production computer. We walked through pretty much the same steps I had done based on the support documents I found. Eventually, we had to remove all of the Adobe and Macromedia products once again. This time, though, the installer did not run. We had to go one step further and create a fresh local admin account on the computer before the installer would work. Then, I had to reinstall my Adobe and Macromedia products.

Finally, I did get the new version installed on my computer. So, if you want Photoshop CS3, be prepared to remove all of your Adobe and Macromedia software and, in my case, spend about two hours on the phone talking to a technician. When did Adobe’s quality drop to this level? They use to be very reliable. Well, those days seem to be gone.