CS3 won't install :(

[bforrester]

Hi everyone,

I'm throwing this out there as a 'grasping at straws' effort before I call Adobe. My wife is taking a Photoshop class at school so she can start helping with some of our PP. To date, I've been using GIMP, but was really excited to be able to start using PS CS3 Extended. So we bought the Education edition from the college and last night I sat down to install it.

First, I'm running WinXP Pro SP2 w/ 1GB RAM Radeon X600 video and plenty of HD space.

In short I consistently get the following messages:
Successfully installed Shared components,
Photoshop CS3 - Component install failed
Shared Components install failed

After the install I have Bridge, Stock Photos, Device Central, and Extend Script toolkit installed, but no Photoshop

So.. "No big deal" I think. I'm a software engineer by trade, I can look at the logs, see what went wrong and fix them. Or so I thought. The logs showed the install failing because of a conflict with Microsofts SQL Server. I'm not using it anymore so I uninstalled it. In addition, after reading online Troubleshooting docs, I uninstalled all Adobe products (I had downloaded Lightroom Beta a long time ago) including the newly installed Adobe apps, turned off my anti-virus, and against my better judgement, turned off my firewall. There were some posts online stating that Adobes Passport can be blocked by the firewall on install causing failure.

Again after hours of uninstall and reinstall, I still get the same failures. Now when I check my event logs, I only see one warning complaining about a registry or service is still in use, but there's no additional info

This is incredibly frustrating, and to boot, we can't take the software back to the Bookstore after it's opened, AND when I look at Adobe's support page, it looks like you have to pay for any sort of support.

So, in despiration I'm wondering if anyone here has had a similar experience
, or any ideas before I break down and call them tonight?

[brian.austin]

Go to the Adobe Photoshop Forums at Adobe Photoshop - User to User Forums and select your version. Select the Search Forums link at the top of the page and try "install registry". There were quite a few returns.

I find most of my answers to these types of issues in the forums there. Posting there gets a pretty fast response, too.

[bforrester]

Thanks Brian.. I'll give it a shot.

[bforrester]

FYI, problem solved. For those who may be having the same problems, I called Adobe and they informed me that the DVD is not 'friendly' with some optical drives.. The solution: Download and install the demo (went smoothly), and enter your serial number to unlock/register it.

[TonyK]

My feeling is they should find a solution to the "unfriendly" DVD problem.

[kevin_c]

I had to uninstall the Flash plugin to get mine to install - I'd initially tried turning off A/V and firewall, then installing from the HD with no joy.

For info - Aparently ALL Adobe full retail versions of CS3 suite are the same as the trials, so it makes no difference if you do what you did and download the trial and just put in your serial to activate.