I’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to install Adobe Creative Suite 4 on my work machine. I was the last of four of us on a group license to install it. And I was the lucky one who ran into problems with the installation.

Specifically, when I got past entering the serial number and telling the installer where to install the programs, I got to a page saying “Preparing to Install…” The Install button was disabled for about ten seconds, and then it was enabled. If I clicked it, the same thing happened. It was one of those “how to keep an idiot busy” situations.

I installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 and got some help disabling the anti-virus software on the computer (which I didn’t have rights to do). So if you encounter this problem, try these first (if you’re running Vista, try Service Pack 1).

After trying a lot of different things with one of my department’s technical support reps, we managed to install Fireworks only. After that, I could install Dreamweaver and Acrobat 9. But nothing else would go. I even tried searching on Adobe’s site for some information and found a forum thread that wasn’t completely resolved.

If you’ve heard anything about Adobe technical support’s reputation, you probably don’t blame me for waiting so long to call them. That, and their phone number is virtually impossible to find on Adobe.com. So after hunting for it for a while (I found it once before), I googled for it. And I came across a helpful site called contacthelp.com that listed the number and other information.

So I called and got someone whom I’d guess is from Asia. He didn’t sound real excited, but after he spent a few minutes looking for the solution after I’d explained the problem, he pointed me to KB article #403995. This article explains how to run the CS4 Clean Utility to wipe out any extraneous files that could be interfering with the installation. I discovered that I had Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit 2 and also the CS4 version from somewhere. I wiped them out using this utility. Lo and behold, CS4 installed successfully.

Chalk one up for Adobe support. According to the Adobe page on contacthelp.com, some people come away extremely dissatisfied (to put it mildly), and others have a good experience. Adobe support seems to be hit and miss, but their reputation is largely negative. I understand that it’s impossible for one person to know everything about every Adobe product, so perhaps it’s a training issue with getting the information. But that KB article should have come up in the results when I searched broadly for information about the CS4 installation. There’s probably some work behind the scenes to do there. But ever the helpful type, I went back to that forum thread and posted a link to the KB article. And this post here increases the chances that someone having this same problem will find a timely resolution.

Apparently, this was an issue with CS3 because there is a CS3 cleanup utility. So look for this solution for the next Creative Suite as well if you hit this problem.

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