SOLVED: Blank Installer Alert dialog - CS4 Installer vs Safari 4

Question

According to the Adobe KB, the blank installer alert dialog is a result of having Safari 4 installed. (Seriously?!)
They were of the opinion that it meant you didn't meet minimum system requirements, but that's not the only way to get it. You can also get it for something as piddling as have Safari or Firefox running when you launch the Installer. (OMG! He's running a browser! Stop everything!!!1!)
As such, here's a way to locate the actual error message that should be in the Installer window.
The Fix
The fix assumes you have already run the CS4 installer and staring at a blank Installer Alert right now. If you're not, do so first.
Then do the following...
Launch Console, located in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder.
Click the Logs button in the upper left of the window.
In the list of logs on the left, navigate to:/Library/Logs/Adobe/Installers
Locate the current install. It will end in today's date.log.gz. For example:Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium 4.0 07-24-2009.log.gz
Click the log and scroll to the very end, where you will see an ERROR, followed by the reason.
For example:
[       0] Fri Jul 24 11:24:37 2009 ERROR
Installation cannot continue until the following applications are closed:
- Firefox
Please exit these applications and then click Retry to proceed.
Now you can Force Quit the Installer (option-click on the icon in the Dock to see this menu item), rectify the situation, and try, try again...
Hope this helps others.
PS to any Adobe personell who might drop by: You cannot kill the Installer & Updater soon enough. Give us Apple Install packages like Jobs intended!
I just wasted 5 or 6 hours of my company's time and 12gb of your bandwidth installing a bunch of copies of CS3 because of the wretched Installer/Updater. If I'd had Apple Install packages, I could have downloaded it once and fired the updates to all machines and been done in 20 minutes.

Answer 1

Harbs just pointed me to an excellent blog post that gives me hope there will eventually be light at the end of the Installer tunnel in CS5, btw. Others might take heart from it too. I'm including a quick quote from the start of it to whet your appetite. It definitely deserves wider distribution!
Adobe Updater Approach
Adobe's updater technology through CS4 is known as the Adobe Update
Manager (AUM.) AUM has a long history of various problems. Our user
community has been vocal about the number and types of problems
experienced through AUM. In the next instance of the Creative Suite, we
intend to provide a different update experience that should address a
number of the most egregious problems discussed thus far. In particular:
Failure of an update to successfully apply to a user's system
Failure to adequately roll back a partial or failed update, thus leaving the user's system in an unusable state
The update process interferes with users trying to get their own work done
When we started out the design for the new Adobe Updater we set a few simple goals:
Make the Adobe Updater install the updates successfully and if the
updater fails, ensure whatever was installed as part of updater is
rolled back and the machine is back to its orginal state.
Make the Adobe Updater non-intrusive. The Adobe Updater should not
interfere with the user's tasks by poping dialogs in middle of your
extremely critical workflows. It will not be an in your face
application.
Make sure the Adobe Updater when running does not hog your CPU cycles.
Using the Adobe Updater should be a pleasant experience.
Checking for updates is silent and the notification for available updates is clean and unobtrusive.
Provide ways for system administrators to turn-off updates completly.
Secondarily, we also want to enable easier management of updates by
system administrators.