Adobe CS3 Install Solution

For those who did a bit of searching on their own part and know that an older version of Flash is messing up the Adobe CS3 install…

Even after deleting all instances of Flash on both the harddrive and registry, I was not able to install Adobe so hopefully this solution helps a few people. Please make sure you have done a bit of research yourself first; I recommend reading Components Install Failed at the very least to have some idea of what you need to do.

First off: Do NOT reinstall Adobe CS3 over and over again. Go to the Content CD >… Goodies > Adobe Flash > Flash Player Install

Since the Flash Player is the one messing up, you only need to run Flash to see if you fixed your problem. If you didn’t, you’ll get an error message about an older version of Flash. This takes only a minute, compared to the hour spent installing CS3.

When you’ve made sure you deleted all instances of Flash and still have this problem, go to Run, enter eventvwr, Application… Take a look at the errors. One should be the older version of Flash from before, but you’ll notice other errors as well.

For me, there was another error claiming “Unexpected or missing value…” and ending in “…\Microsoft\Installer\Products\{Random Gibberish}\SourceList”. {RandomGibberish} is what you need to search for in your registry now and remove. You may have to do this multiple times if you have more than one error (I had 2 in addition to the older version of Flash).

After doing this, I ran the Flash install again (from Content disc) and it installed fine. Ran the Adobe CS3 and it installed fine as well.