Lightroom is not installed but Creative Cloud thinks it is!

Question

I have completely uninstalled the entire Creative Cloud set of products including Lightroom 4.3 and Lightroom 5 (both 64-bit).  The icons changed to generic icons, indicating that the application link was broken, due to the fact that the product was no longer installed.
When I go to Adobe's CC website to try and download Lightroom 5 after signing in, my web browser asks which application I want to use to open the download link.  I choose the Creative Cloud application but nothing updates in CC Desktop.  I am on Windows 7 64-bit SP1.
I do not know why Creative Cloud Desktop still thinks those apps are installed and does not give me the button to install it.  Instead it shows "up-to-date".
Any help is greatly appreciated.
P.S.  I also checked with the Adobe Cleaner Tool to make sure no CC apps were installed.

Answer 1

Lehestro (and anyone else having this problem on a Mac), I had this same problem tonight and solved it. I got a new hard drive for my Mac Pro today and did a clean install of Mavericks on it. When I installed Adobe Creative Cloud for the first time, it thought I alfeady had Lightroom installed and "Up to date" for some reason even though I hadn't installed anything but the Creative Cloud Desktop. It's possibly because it detected the application on my old hard drive, which I had mounted to transfer files to the new drive.
Anyway, I first tried installing the Lightroom trial application because I read that Cretive Cloud would update it to stop asking for a serial number. I installed the trial, then moved all of my relevant Lightroom settings over from the old hard drive to the new one so I could keep all my settings. I got most of these files from the various preferences files inside "~/Library/Preferences" (including all files and folders that start with "Adobe" as well as "com.Adobe" and "~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/". I believe that's where all the files I transferred were. And of course I copied my Lightroom catalog, backups, and previews files to my user folder as well (just do a Google search for "moving lightroom files to new computer" and you'll see what files to move). I used the same directory structure on my new hard drive so there would be minimal confusin when moving all my files over.
While that did keep all of my settings quite nicely (and I mean everything, including camera calebration defaults that I had changed and things like that), it still asked me for a serial number.
What eventually worked was simple. I dragged the "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.app" icon out of my Applications folder and into the trash. I then logged out of Creative Cloud, shut down my computer, unmounted the old hard drive, rebooted, and logged back into CC. Once I did that, Lightroom wasn't listed in my installed apps anymore, and became available as a new download. I downloaded and installed it from CC, and voila! Now it launches without asking for a serial number, and it still kept all my settings that I dragged over from the old hard drive. The only thing I had to do was go to the Plugins Manager and re-install my Picasa and SmugMug plugins. When I did that, it still even still retained their settings and had all the images in the galleries I had built on and published via my old system.