I bought Photoshop CS3, since I am seriously into photography and Gimp is too painful to use.
So, all was fine for about one week on my Windows XP installation, and then it stopped working – it would just lock on startup, no error message, no status dialog. Googling around didn’t reveal anything that could be the issue. Going in with a debugger revealed that it was locked somewhere in the Adobe authentication stuff; it looked like a deadlock of some sort. Something, somewhere, had tweaked the authentication, and it wasn’t going to let me run it.
Did I mention that this is for a legally purchased copy?
So I deinstalled everything I had installed, but no luck. I contacted Adobe Technical Support, told them the problem and even offered to give them a stack trace, so they sent me a standard list of things to try, including a) reinstalling, b) copying the CD to a local disk and reinstalling, c) disabling every service and reinstalling, d) rebooting into safe mode and reinstalling. There were other things, including “clear out bad fonts” (didn’t have any) and “reformat the drive.”
To be honest, reformatting the drive and reinstalling the OS seemed punitive, considering that the program had worked for an entire week before deciding to not start up any more, and… well… this was a legally purchased copy.
So, I googled around, and found people that claimed you should clear the cache, and more references to clearing fonts, and whatnot, but there was still no luck.
So, at this point, I had a couple of options. I could download a cracked version from Bittorrent, or fire up the debugger and figure out a crack myself, but in either case it’s a ridiculous situation. If I have to get an illegal copy so that I can run a program that I purchased, what is the advantage in buying it in the first place?
Nonetheless, spending 3 or 4 more hours Googling, I found out that Adobe has a patch. A patch for Vista, mind you, which is why it didn’t come up before, but it patches the program and makes the licensing work.
So, hopefully, you’ve run into this article while searching for the same solution, and I have just saved you some small amount of frustration. Go now, hence, to this thread, and make sure to download this patch.
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