If you ever have problems and need to uninstall/reinstall, prepare for serious grief. I've seen it on many of my machines (here and at work). The OSX version is what usually annoys me (it is worse), but I got to spend all night fighting with the Windows one tonight...
0. Trying to file my taxes, and needed to open last year's saved return (PDF).
1. Acrobat was broken, hard-locking 30-45 seconds after opening and appearing to work okay.
2. Followed all the weird and seemingly unrelated steps in their KB article on the subject one at a time.
3. Last choice was to un/reinstall.
4. Acrobat Uninstaller crashed about 1/3rd of the way through the first attempt and then wouldn't run anymore.
5. CS3 Full uninstall hung, no error, just stopped and wouldn't exit (had to manually kill the process).
6. Decided to try the old reinstall-to-uninstall trick...
7. Installer hung, no error, just stopped and wouldn't exit.
8. Finally worked on the 4th try (rebooting all the time, la la la)
9. I then just wanted to view my PDF, so I tried opening it. Acrobat seemed to work fine (yay) except when I ran Photoshop it would hard-lock after a few seconds (if you have Acrobat through a Creative Suite, you have to open/activate one of the other CS apps before you run Acrobat in order to use it).
10. Hey, at least I got to look at my PDF...
11. When I was done with my taxes (oh, and the Acrobat printer wouldn't work anymore -- that actually had worked before I started this mess), I proceeded to attempt to uninstall the suite again. Since I couldn't print the PDF to save a copy of my return, now I get to work on my taxes again tomorrow for a little bit. (Yay.)
12. Uninstall STILL failed (this time I went straight to the CS3 full removal). Same thing, just locked up. No error. Left it running for a full 25 minutes with no progress change at all, just to be sure.
13. Tried again, and this time I used Process explorer to investigate what was going on while it was locked (because it locked again at the same point). I saw 4 instances of the msiexec.exe application running in a process tree as a child of the services.exe application. There was also a copy running as a child of the adobe setup.exe application.
14. I killed the process on the services.exe copies one at a time. After I killed the third one, it "unstuck" the Adobe Installer for a little bit, but it froze again at the end of that "step".
15. I then killed the msiexec.exe process that was a child of the setup.exe application. It unstuck again and continued until it was completed. (Yay!)
16. Then, just for giggles, I ran the good, old CS3clean.exe application that Adobe provided (but of course, it required me to install an obscure microsoft system component, not included, before it would even run). Got that all done.
17. Just finished rebooting... Should I try reinstalling from scratch?
Deep breath...
Wish me luck!
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Topic: Way OT - Is It Possible To Hate Any Installer More Than the Adobe CS3 Installer? (Read 2983 times)