CS3 Won't Run, Uninstall or Deactivate, Can't Reinstall; Junked.

Question

Windows XP Pro SP2
2GB Ram
Adobe CS3 Production Premium
Thanks to Adobe's new licensing system I have a $1700 production suite that is completely useless.
After a few weeks of working fine, it suddenly decided, for reasons unknown, to cease working. With the exception of Acrobat Reader, no portion of CS3 suite will load, all crash out with an error during the loading process, all with what appears to be an issue related to Flexnet licensing.
I've tried following the crazy instructions regarding removing it, but not even Windows' Add/Remov eprograms can remove it because it needs to be deactivated first, but I can't do that because I can't load any CS3 application to deactivate it.
When I tried manually removing all traces of CS3, including all the registry hacks Adobe barbarically suggests (rather inelegant for a supposedly industry profrssional product) the reinstallation goes awry and after it finally finishes, all applications still fail because it is supposedly not activated properly.
At this point I can only assume that the product is merely junk and that Adobe simply does not care. (they have not suggested a real solution, only clumsy and idiotic suggestions to remove it manually and reinstall over and over).
My last recourse is to completely format my hard drive, and completely reinstall Windows XP SP2 which is a major undertaking in and of itself, entailing a massive backup and reinstallation of all my software, as well as all my project and business information.
Adobe (and Photoshop) have truly gone downhill since Photoshop 7, and I see very little of any value or worth in this "Creative Suite" as the only thing it seems to create is frustration and additional problems. Is this sort of licensing really stopping software pirates? Am I supposed to suffer through lost contracts and countless hours of frustration after paying nearly $2000 for the software so that some pirate can't use it? Why don't they have a standalone application that can handle activation/deactivation and installation repair? Flexnet is practically a system crippling virus. And why did the add/remove wizard force me to shut down Yahoo messenger before it could run, and then tell me it couldn't do anything anyway?
This software is junk. Now I am forced to find a new product to edit my digital photography and create web and video content (hopefully for less than the $2000 I wasted on these discs that are now only good as beer coasters).
-Mark

Answer 1

>Any chance your firewall is blocking Flexnet?
No, I had disabled the firewall entirely after the issue presented itself. When I initially installed CS3 for the very first time I gave it (and all Adobe products) full permissions to allow for updating and any other internet-related communications they might require. Initially everything installed correctly, activated properly and all applications worked fine. After two or three weeks everything suddenly failed. After trying to load Photoshop and getting the mysterious failure, I had tried running other apps and all CS3 specific apps failed, giving me my first clue that it was licensing related (especially in light of the fact that non CS3-specific Adobe apps *would* load, such as Flash Encoder, Acrobat, and mysteriously, Soundbooth).
It's my belief that since the Flexnet licensing subsystem (which is crucial to running CS3) is prone to corruption, deletion or other conflicts, that there should be a standalone application that can perform a verification check for Flexnet activation and repair, registration and updating without requiring an Adobe CS3 app to be loaded. Especially since the deactivation procedure requires loading into a working CS3 app. I was told by a forum member that this is "the least of my worries" yet it is a concern for those who wish to minimize the amount of time spent calling customer service and dealing with installation and activation problems.
It's most likely that something I installed, uninstalled or use, had caused a conflict or corruption in Flexnet thereby preventing CS3 from operating. Following Adobe's suggestions, I stopped and restarted Flexnet, and Photoshop asked me to reactivate, and the reactivation was successful, however the application still crashed when it got to the "Initializing Palettes..." loading stage. All other CS3 applications, at that point, also failed to load, and all gave the same error code (which also referenced adobeowl.dll).
The Add/Remove system didn't work properly, and so I also followed other suggestions (as per Adobe) of manual removal, running CS3clean.exe and reinstalling, but that also failed to resolve the issue (twice running CS3clean.exe first at level 1 and then level 2, I hadn't bothered with level 3 at this point as there seems to be no trace of Adobe software on my system), and the applications gave the same errors after reinstallation, activation and attempting to launch.
The last recourse suggested was a "low level format" as that would be the only way to ensure no remaining traces of activation, licensing or prior installation, and would generate a new and unique activation and installation environment. However, since the actual *problem* has not been determined (nobody seems to know *why* or *how* this has happened) I am extremely reluctant to take such an action if the problem is likely to crop up again.
Since other people have reported the same problem, (not to mention many issues regarding installation problems) I really don't wish to spend hours backing up my system, formatting and reinstalling Windows, updating Windows, reinstalling every driver and software package and then gambling that Adobe *might* work properly after all that.
Since there is obviously a conflict with some software I run, and the other software I run is software I own and use routinely, then it's evident that Adobe Flexnet licensing is unable to maintain a coherent and secure record of my ownership of the CS3 product. That being the case, I don't see any point in continuing to wrestle with it until such time as Adobe determines a cause for the problem and issues a fix for it (though I doubt they will, they don't seem concerned in the slightest). For now, CS3 is no longer a piece of software I can use effectively or rely upon to be part of my production pipeline. I'm looking into other options for my workflow, and recommending against CS3 (as a whole) in general, except on "clean" systems with virtually no other potentially conflicting non-OS software present.
-Ma