Super Ginormous

Installing CS3 Web Premium

UPDATE: This article may be out of date. Additional information on installing CS3 is now available (Thanks to Barry Hills at Adobe!). Please read through the article “Additional Information on Installing CS3” before attempting anything on this page.

Adobe Creative Suite 3A brief disclaimer… The following process enabled me to install Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium after more than a dozen different attempts to install the Suite on two different computers. It may or may not work for you. Before installing new software or changing your system configuration it is ALWAYS a good idea to BACKUP your current configuration before making changes. Having said that…

UPDATE: You may need to adjust the permissions on some Registry Values in order to get CS3 to install. To do this, you’ll need to login as Administrator on your system. These keys have permissions that don’t allow anyone to write to them. Logging in as Administrator will allow you to override this. (Being logged in as a user with Administrator privileges will not work.) To access your registry editor, go to Start > Run > regedit The following registry keys were identified while trying to install Acrobat 8 Professional…

Before making changes to any of these value, I highly suggest backing up your registry.

  • \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\AcroIEHelper.AcroIEHlprObj\CLSID
  • \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\CLSID\{06849E9F-C8D7-4D59-B87D-784B7D6BE0B3}\InprocServer32
  • \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\TypeLib\{5F226421-415D-408D-9A09-0DCD94E25B48}\1.0\FLAGS

This installation technique comes from an idea presented in an Adobe TechNote for installing Dreamweaver CS3 in Selective Startup Mode on Windows XP. I sincerely want to thank Jean who mentioned this technique on another blog post of mine (link).

Before you start, I highly suggest copy the complete installation DVD to your computer. Trust me, this will cut your install times in half. (You can do this by going to My Computer, selecting the DVD, click on the icon and Ctrl+Drag the disc to your desktop. It will copy the entire disk to your desktop.)

  1. In Windows XP, click the Start button and select Run.
  2. Type msconfig in the Open field. This will bring up the System Configuration Utility dialog box.
  3. Under Selective Startup, deselect all of the check boxes except for Load System Services. Leave Use Original BOOT.INI selected.
  4. Click the Services tab and click the Disable All button to deselect all of the check boxes. There will be a few check boxes that cannot be deselected, like DCOM Server and Remote Procedure Call. Leave those selected.
    cs3-install-001.png
  5. Still in the Services tab, enable Windows Installer.
  6. Ignore the other tabs.
    cs3-install-002.png
  7. Click OK and restart your machine when prompted.
  8. After restarting into Selective Startup mode, install Creative Suite 3 Web Premium.
  9. Once Creative Suite 3 Web Premium has been installed, run msconfig again and specify Normal Startup Mode.
  10. Restart the machine back into Normal Startup mode and see if the problem with Creative Suite 3 Web Premium has been resolved.

Installing software shouldn’t be this hard. My problems stemmed from having tried out the Photoshop CS3 Beta, and I knew that I was using unproven software that could cause future problems… Using this process, I was able to successfully install Creative Suite 3 Web Premium on my system. It succeeded where every other technique had failed. Hopefully it will help you get CS3 up and running on your system as well.

Chris Harrison

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