Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 Failure

Did your installation of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 fail? Mine did.

When my shipment arrived, I slapped the install disk into my Mac Pro’s CD/DVD drive.

Right away, the hassles began.

No "Install" or "Setup" application was visible, so, after looking around to make sure no one was watching, I read the printed installation instructions, and then the disks "Read Me" file. The Read Me said to insert the disk into the drive, and follow the on-screen instructions.

Did I see any on-screen instructions? No.

Left to my own devices, I explored through various folders, and soon discovered a Setup application inside a folder called "Adobe Photoshop Elements 6."

I ran this app, and settled back for a long wait; the installation process proceeded at a glacial pace.

But the install failed! The shared components installed properly, but the Elements 6 application itself failed to install.

Rebooting, and reinstalling was no help. Now, I’m, getting severely irritated.

After forty-five minutes of Googling, and wading through the various Adobe support forums, I had found nothing useful. At wit’s end, I tried one last search for "component install failed" in a Photoshop (Not Elements) support forum. This time I found the golden nugget!

I learned that users who had installed the Photoshop CS3 beta, but subsequently did -not- activate the full version, had Adobe detritus files that will prevent a successful Photoshop and Elements 6 installation. I had done exactly that; I used the CS3 beta but decided not to buy the full version.

Reading more, I learned about an application that will remove the offending CS3 files. It’s helpfully called Adobe CS3Clean Script.dmg.

Here’s a link to a Adobe KnowledgeBase article that links to the CS3 cleaner script:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402151

Once downloaded and mounted, the script will run a series of Terminal commands that require you to OK each step of the cleanup process.

After completing the scrubbing, the Elements 6 installer ran flawlessly.

I’m still not happy! Why doesn’t Adobe mention this CS3 issue in the Read Me? And why does the printed installation instruction say to "follow the on-screen instructions?"