How do I disable all non-essential components in the CS6 installer

Question

A new question in the spirit of http://forums.adobe.com/thread/548877 and http://forums.adobe.com/message/2778575, where I asked this question for CS4 and CS5 and eventually discovered how to do this (at least for CS4; CS5 was a mess...): How do I disable all the non-essential components in the Photoshop CS6 installer?
I already found the payloads/Media_db.db sqlite 3 database and wiped the DependencyData table. This goes a long way - unlike CS5, which was a maze of hidden xml configs and sqlite databases, for CS6 just wiping this single table will give the user full control over what the installer will put in the computer. With the dependencies wiped, we can now see all the stuff it's actually going to install:
Bridge (normal and x64) - 187 and 262 MB
CMaps (normal and x64) - 7.2 and 7.2 MB
CSXS Extensions - 1.3MB
CSXS Infrastructure - 6.8MB
Color - photoshop, EU, JA, NA - 1.5, 2.1, 3.0, 2.5MB
Video profiles - 4.7KB
Dynamic Link Media Server - 96MB
DynamicLink Support - 6.1MB
ExtendScript Toolkit - 19MB
Extension Manageer - 16MB
Fonts recommended (normal and x64) - 110 and 110MB (why are there x86 and x64 versions? more of an open question than one that really needs an answer, but this is not how fonts work. There are no separate x86 and x64 flavoured OpenType fonts)
Fonts required (normal and x64) - 123 and 123MB
Hunspell Linguistics Plugin (normal and x64) - 181 and 181MB
Linguistics (normal and x64) - 46 and 46MB
Mini Bridge (normal and x64) - 4.0MB
PDF Library Files (normal and x64) - 75 and 75MB
Photoshop (normal and x64) - 486 and 563MB
Photoshop Support - 9.4MB
Player for Embedding 3.3 (normal and x64) - 21 and 26MB
Switchboard 2.0 - 1.1MB
Type Support (normal and x64) - 6 and 6MB
Winsoft Linguistics Plugin (normal and x64) - 8.2 and 8.5MB
XMP Panels - 4.9MB
ColorCommonSetCMYK - 13MB
ColorCommonSetRGB - 8.6KB
Camera Profiles Installer - 285MB
MSVC++2005 redist. (normal and x64) - 11 and 11MB
MSVC++2008 redist. (normal and x64) - 11 and 11MB
MSVC++2010 redist. (normal and x64) - 11 and 11MB
MSVC80_CRT (normal and x64) - 0.0 and 0.0KB
PDF Settings - 2.4MB
Camera Raw 7  (normal and x64) - 22 and 24MB
Suite Shared Configuration - 3.2MB
Some of these things we really want installed (Photoshop, CMaps, XMP panels, Type Support and required fonts and color profiles are pretty much the minimal set required for a functional Photoshop installation), but some of these things really have no right to be silentedly installed. There's a good gigabyte of nonsense that someone who just wants Photoshop has no need for. Denying them the option to unselect these things during installation is a bit evil (whatever happened to the 'advanced' or 'custom' installation option? That was a good option).
That said, there's still something funky going on - unselecting all components indicates that the installation will required 0.0KB on disk. However, selecting Photoshop CS6 x64, which indicates its size is 563MB, results in an installation that requires 677MB on disk. Similar things happen for other components; CMaps is 7.2MB, but when you select it, it suddenly requires 121MB on disk.
Much last last time, I fully appreciate the install team's choices in making sure the installer will always work as long as people don't tamper with it, but I'm not one of those people - I do tamper with it, because I want to control exactly what lands on my disk. So: how do I find out what these secret things are that are not listed after wiping the dependency data so that I can explicitly pick individual components? Which additional steps are required to reveal the hidden dependencies that will apparently still be installed, or aren't factored into the size indication for the various components? And finally, how do I make the installer NOT determine that "this is not a genuine installer, you may have a counterfeit product" =)
I know it's been altered; I modified it, because I think your install process is trying to force stuff onto my computer that I never asked for, nor will ever use (I know they're quality products, they just have no right to exist on my computers. If I had the choice to say no, I'd acknowledge them as quality products instead).
- Mike Kamermans
nihongoresources.com
NB: if Eric Wilde ends up replying to this post: I still remember your willingness to help figure this out for CS5, two years ago. Thank you again for that.

Answer 1

I can see why you wouldn't want to release information that lets people set up arbitrary installers, but that's why I mostly wanted those two specific hashes. The installer team can just generate them without ever saying how, and we will only be able to use them to validate the installer for the modification that lets you pick components. This should in no way interfere with the desire to prevent dangerous installers making it into the wild; in fact, it kind of guarantees that's impossible.
I know you can't guarantee it'll work or test it, and that's fine. Past experience has shown that CS3, CS4 and CS5 work fine with updates (and most updates don't apply to Photoshop, they apply to the additional components that I traditionally don't install), so I'm pretty sure it'll work fine with CS6 too, although of course it could go wrong in which case I can always fall back to a normal install.
Would you be willing to ask the install team whether they could generate just these two numbers, based on the single SQL command run on Media_db.db from the main payload directory? I can fully understand not wanting to give the "here is how you generate the hashes" information, but generating two specific numbers that don't work for anything but this specific query should be just as safe as the various hashes we can already see for the other Media_db.db files in the various payload directories (so they wouldn't reveal anything not already known about how to reverse engineer the hashing algorithm). It'd help tech-savvy customers quite a bit without playing into the hands of criminally minded jerks (I actually had the pleasure of running into a duped CS3 Extended disc several years ago! I had ordered CS3 for personal use, and mysteriously received a CS3 extended version with a volume licensing key in what looked like an official normal CS3 box. Needless to say, authorities and Adobe were notified).
<<I think the right answer to this issue is to simply remove from the products those items that are not required to execute the product. That's actually something we're aggressively pursuing this summer so that the product size reduces in future releases, particularly for PS.>>
It's not possible to take components out of the payloads directory without the installer complaining that errors have occurred. It really wants all those files there when it starts =(
<<Have you investigated using AAMEE? I don't think that will get rid of all the "extraneous" pieces; but, it does provide some flexibility in creating an install package that can then be pushed out through normal deployment tools (e.g. SCCM).>>
I did, but unfortunately AAMEE requires the use of a volume license key, which I don't have. We only have individual products keys for the machines that will get Photoshop CS6.
- Mike