My problems with CS4 installer

Question

"You're free to speak your mind my friend as long as you agree with me."
The Ostrich, Steppenwolf (the group)
I was wondering if the post I made two days ago had generated any feedback.
It did, in the form of having been removed from the forum. Well, Adobe, it's your football, so why don't I try again, minus the part where I carped about the outsourced support, and the sparse information available online.
I just got upgrade edition of CS4 Design Premium. It won't install. I've wasted an entire weekend trying. I tried every tip I could find in the Forums and KB, and none of them work. I am trying to upgrade an installed copy of Design Premium CS3.The symptoms are as follows:
No icons get created for the parts of CS4 that do install.
Illustrator, In Design and Acrobat won't install.
Installer aborts with uninformative error message.
Installer sometimes kills jscript, but refuses to run without it.
Installation has borked my system three times, obliging me to restore my C: drive from backup image.
Support tool doesn't identify any problems.
From the posts I've read, it would appear Acrobat is the problem. I'd like to try once more with CS3 Acrobat uninstalled, but it doesn't appear to have its own uninstaller. My difficulties typify two problems I've seen in other software in the last year. Vista compatibility sometimes breaks XP apps, and has been one of the principal reason XP testing has become less through than it should be (I have XP Pro system). Also, monolithic installers that try to do a dozen things at once are failure prone. These often have cleanup scripts written after the fact, and those get even less rigorous testing than the installers whose flaws they are trying to fix.
I had a CS3 issue when it was first introduced. My call was fielded promptly by a U.S. based technician who provided a solution in less than a minute... (This is where the part appeared that I suspect got my submission bounced the last time.)
Since previous post, I've killed another evening for nothing. I'd like one question answered; the KBs say that cleanup script leaves CS3 in working condition, but the first thing it asks permission to do is remove CS3 from the system. Does it in fact do this? I have no way of knowing since I've had to restore from image backups both times I ran it, and I can ill afford to have neither version working.

Answer 1

Hi William-
I am sorry you are having trouble getting up and running.
As Bob/Peter have said we put a lot of effort into improving the installer experience in CS4 but there is some issue going on that I would like to help you resolve.
Have you tried the "Adobe Support Advisor" tool?
http://www.adobe.com/support/loganalyzer/
This tool looks at your install log and helps direct you to a specific Tech Doc if there is a known issue flagged. It also helps package up your installation log which the support folks may beed to help troubleshoot the issue
Regarding...
"At bare minimum, I would have expected to have been assigned a case number by now, to have been told how common my issue(s) were, and given some idea of how likely it would be that a fix would be forthcoming. So far, after two long telephone calls, one to Customer Service and one to Technical Support, all I have learned is that installation issues are quite common. I am still waiting for a case number for these issues, submitted via web two days ago, and I have been unable to learn how high a priority has been assigned to real fixes or workarounds. "
When you talked to Customer Support/Tech Support you should get a case number. If you can send me the case number(s) I can help you get this escalated.
[email protected]
Thanks,
Barry