rant - adobe CS3 not working

[chaosbunny]

Sorry for the rant, I'm just so extremely mad at adobe right now.

So, Friday I bought Adobe Creative Suite 3 with my hard earned money. Install it on my iMac, everything works just fine. Then, I want to install it on my PowerBook G4 1.67 ghz, from their license stuff I'm allowed to have it on 2 machines. Now the trouble begins, I activate it, it's activated but bam, illustrator, indesign & acrobat won't work, I just get the "program unexpectedly quit" message. Photoshop and bridge seem to work though.

Ok, I try a couple of different things, repairing permissions and scripts, uninstall and reinstall it, try to copy it from my iMac, nothing works. So I decide I can only reinstall the complete system. Did that today, and now it says the maximum number of activation is reached... Fine, I plan to use it in demo mode and contact adobe support on Monday... but guess what, it crashes again and shows the same symptoms than before, on a fresh clean reinstall! How crappy is their software? Now I've wasted my entire weekend to get it to work for nothing.

Next time I'll just download their software, at least I will not have wasted time AND money with their crap then.

Again, sorry for my rant, I hope you understand how frustrated I am right now. Anybody has an idea what to do?

 

[chaosbunny]

Well, no answer, but maybe this helps someone who is having the same issue in the future.

After an extensive internet research I finally got it to work, on Sunday 11 pm local time. It seems like CS3 can have problems with fonts that are absolutely fine for CS2. I deactivated all fonts except the system ones and it worked. Reactivated the most important ones and it still works.

I'm still a little bit frustrated but at least it's running right now. The strange thing is, I've had pretty much the same fonts activated on the PowerBook and iMac, where it worked in the first place.

 

[irishgrizzly]

Sorry to hear of your trouble – sucks. Which type of font were causing the problems – i.e. TT, Open, PS?

 

[chaosbunny]

There is more or less no efficient way to find out. The only thing would be to activate each font I had activated one by one and see if it still works. And I had many fonts activated.

But I doubt it has something to do with true type, postscript or opentype, since I activated all kinds of fonts again and it still works now.

 

[irishgrizzly]

Do you just a font management program like Suitcase? If you don't you should like about getting, it's only a couple of hundred euro and well worth it.

 

[chaosbunny]

I use Linotype FontExplorer X. It's a pretty good font management program and it is free.

But I admit, I have an awful chaos in there... but that one is my and not the programs fault.

 

[dcr]

There is more or less no efficient way to find out. The only thing would be to activate each font I had activated one by one and see if it still works. And I had many fonts activated.

There is an efficient way to find the bad font -- it's called binary search. Activate half your fonts. If the problem occurs, the bad font is in the newly activated set. If it does not occur, the bad font is in the deactivated set. Now repeat the process, discarding the half set that "works" each time until you're down to 1.

If you have 1000 fonts, you can find the bad font in 10 steps.

 

[rodgertx]

So I decide I can only reinstall the complete system.

This is where it's gone wrong. When you activate you're version of CS3 you have to de-activate it when when you re-install the whole system. So when you performe a new installation of CS3 on you're computer Adobe thinks it's a third one

The only sollution is to call Adobe en de-activate CS3 by phone. Then you can activate it again.

Cheers!

 

[ezekielrage_99]

This is where it's gone wrong. When you activate you're version of CS3 you have to de-activate it when when you re-install the whole system. So when you performe a new installation of CS3 on you're computer Adobe thinks it's a third one

The only sollution is to call Adobe en de-activate CS3 by phone. Then you can activate it again.

Cheers!

This is part of the reason why I'm not a fan of CS3....

 

[chaosbunny]

This is part of the reason why I'm not a fan of CS3....

I totally agree. I understand that they want to protect their software from being stolen, but the price of this is that things get more complicated for people who actually BUY their programs. And this sucks!