The operation cannot complete because of an unknown error. [Parm]

Question

I manage computer labs for a small college and we recently installed Adobe CS3 Design Premium on our Macintosh labs. When a user launches Adobe Illustrator CS3 (13.0.2), they see a widget with the Ai (Adobe Illustrator) icon and the following text "The operation cannot complete because of an unknown error. [Parm]" and an OK button. At the same time, the console log (~/Library/Logs/Adobe Illustrator CS3/AISuitePea.log) is flooded with something called SuitePea throwing errors, such as these below (this is only a small portion of those thrown):
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1397908844 (leRS)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1397908844 (leRS)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:33:17 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:37:18 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:37:18 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:37:19 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Sep 06 14:37:19 SuitePea Threw error 1394689636 (dF!S)
Some google searching suggested multiple means of dealing with this, from Disk Utility Permissions Repair to plug-in issues/removal. So far, nothing I have tried has yielded any results. My latest attempt was fully uninstalling CS3 using the utility on the CD, and then manually removing all remaining portions I could find on the hard drive (prefs, remaining folders, etc...), rebooting, and then resintalling, but have found I encounter the same result.
Does anyone know what this SuitePea is or what to do about this kind of error?
System Information:
Clients are running Adobe Illustrator 13.0.2
Intel-based iMacs running OS X 10.4.10
User home directories are on a network share, not local
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you,
Branden Ohlinger

Answer 1

When I called Adobe, I was pretty much told that they would not offer any assistance. I offered to purchase the incident support, but they said that wasn't an option with this problem. I had to badger the guy just to get him to say that he believed it was caused by an inability of our network account users to write to the local hard drive. What is below is the results of my attempts to research and solve the problem from that point.
The way we addressed it was to make a second partition (only 10GB) on the local computers and give full read & write access to it for everyone. Then, we instructed our students to set their Scratch location to that new partition. This does indeed resolve the [PARM] error and some problems trying to save and open large files. It does not address the SUITEPEA errors we are getting in our console log though.
To change the Scratch location:
- click Illustrator in the menu bar
- select Preferences
- click Plug-ins and Scratch
- use the drop-down menu to change the Primary scratch disk
- click OK
Sadly, the above must be done per each individual user and I have not yet found a way to push the preference using Workgroup Manager since the Illustrator preference file is not a normal .plist and the Scratch portion is a rather lengthy string of characters. Adobe did not make this one easy on us and they're not willing to support it (or weren't in my case).
I wish the rest of you better luck than I have had on this issue.
The funny thing is - if Adobe used /Users/Shared for the default scratch location instead of whatever location it currently is, I don't think this would be a problem since all users (in a default Mac OS X install) have full access to /Users/Shared