So yesterday I find that none of my CS3 apps will launch, nor will Premiere Elements. I spend 45 minutes on the phone with Adobe tech support to no avail. The recommendation: Uninstall then reinstall all Adobe apps. Only my Adobe apps are affected. Premiere Elements is not part of the CS3 suite yet it is affected. I asked the tech support person what the connection is between them and she said "none" except some system file who's permissions must have been changed by an outside program like Windows Live OneCare. I asked if she'd seen this problem before and she said "no". Which makes me wonder about the diagnosis. When did Adobe QA become so weak? This is not my first problem with their products. Sadly, there's no real market alternative to Flash or Illustrator. So I get to waste the last few hours of my vacation messing around with software that works one day then does not the next.
So after taking the tech support person's advice, my Adobe products still don't work so I call back. I enter the case number she gave me and the recording says it is not a valid case number. When I eventually get a person, I ask if I got the case number correct. He says it is not closed and later says maybe the person's program crashed while entering it. He stays on the line with me for an 1.5 half trying everything he can think of. The last thing he has me working on he cuts me loose. He says if it fails, I'll have to re-install Windows Vista. I guess he didn't want to stay online if that were to happen (who can blame him?). But, after much anguish, it worked. After 3.5 stressful hours on a vacation day, I have all my Adobe products working again. But it is disturbing that a root cause was never discovered. What caused it? Will it happen again? Is uninstalling all apps via the CS3clean script the only way to solve it? (which, btw, had to be run more than once).
I'd blame Vista for all that stuff. Vista seems to be strangely reminiscent of ME, but what do I know? :-)
ReplyDeleteBy the way, we miss you at work. I hope you were able to enjoy most of your vacation!
You are a lot like Vista ;)
ReplyDeleteI would blame Vista except that it has been out quite a while and in beta forever. One would think the premiere graphics company in the world would have a decent grip on it. All my other programs continued to work happily.
I miss you guys, too. The rest of the vacation was great!
No alternatives to Flash and Illustrator? I think you are being too blinded by the price tags you have spent out on.
ReplyDeleteInkscape and Swish Max my friend, neither are sub-par to Illustrator or Flash respectively.
Hi Winter, thanks for the feedback. Given what a fan of Blender and FlashDevelop I am, I don't think I'm too blinded by a price tag.
ReplyDeleteI look for the best tool for what _I_ have to do. For example, in addition to Photoshop, I use both ArtRage ($25) and Painter ($300) because there are scenarios where works better than the other.
Btw, I have Swish Max and like it for what it can do, I do recommend it, but it is no Flash replacement (yet), I consider it a Flash-supplement.
I've also tried InkScape, it looks promising but is not yet an Illustrator replacement.