at wits end with adobe licensing

cabbey

Howdy folks, I've got a bit of a problem with PS CS 3 licensing that I'm hoping someone else has some idea how to solve. I've talked to Adobe support a number of times, they keep suggesting the same things over and over, even when I tell them I've tried all their suggestions to no avail.

Here's the situation: When I upgraded my macpro from 10.5 to 10.6 there was an issue with the raid array and I ended up having to recover from time machine and start over a couple times, then eventually scratch install 10.6 and migrate users, data and applications from a clone of the hardrive that was made on an external device. After the recoveries from time machine, before the 10.6 upgrade, PS still worked fine. It was a good 2 months before we figured out why the upgrade kept failing and that I needed to do a scratch install, during which time I was running from the external drive instead of my internal raid, and PS definently worked (just really slowly). Ever since the upgrade when I start up Photoshop I get an error that says:

Licensing for this product has stopped working
You cannot use this product at this time. You must repair the problem by uninstalling and the reinstalling this product or contacting your IT administrator or Adobe customer support for help.

I've uninstalled and re-installed CS3 many, many times.

I've used Adobe's downloadable "license problems cleanup" tool in all four modes, several times.

Nothing seems to be able to get it back to functional.

While all this is going on, I upgraded my laptop to 10.6 as well... and when I did it, I upgraded to a bigger harddrive in the process. So I did a scratch install there and migrated users, data and applications from the old harddrive (via an external enclosure). So both systems went through the same upgrade process in the end. Both systems are running under the same license. The laptop never once glitched... PS has *always* worked on the laptop, and still does to this day.

Does anyone have any ideas what to do to fix this? or what to say to Adobe support to get them onto the right script to solve the problem? I'm *really* getting sick of hearing the same support script read to me by their Indian help desk.

Through this, Lightroom continues to function just fine on both machines.

HarlanBear

cabbey, I had the same problem, but on PC running Vista (yea, I know) so not 100% sure this will work for you, but I got the solution from Adobe several months ago. It is a corrupted cache.db file. So solution is to dump your cache.db (database) file, relaunch and re-enter your serial number.

So for PC with PS3 not runing I go to Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/Adobe PCD/cache. There is only one file in there: cache. Which is a .db file. Drag this file out and on to the desktop. Relaunch PS3 and it will ask for your serial number and after entering the serial numer it will start. Should not have the problem anymore because PS3 then creates new cache.db file and runs with that. PS3 may ask you to re-register but if you regestered before, and you probably did, do not re-register because you are already registered. That re-register window may open again in the future when you launch PS3, but I was told to simply click on register later and forget about it.

You can also check Adobe doc KB401528.

Hope this helps.

cabbey

oooh, that KB article had a solution that's been removed from the newer ones! Namely it pointed me at the FLEXnet Publisher directory with their secure license storage. I nuked that and am now being asked for a serial number. Now I just need to find where my old PSE3 serial number is to satisfy upgrade requirements.

THANKS!!

cabbey

Just for completeness, that seems to have been the magic bullet, once I redid the registration I'm back to fully functional. Thanks HarlanBear.