Help with Photoshop Reinstallation

[sheeny (Al)]

What a time for this to happen...


I've been running PS CS3 for a little while now and been very happy with it but last week it started just disappearing when I go to select Save. As you can imagine, this produces certain reactions from the operator at the time.

So I thought I would uninstall and reinstall it. Unfortunately, it won't let me reinstall!Not only that, but I still had old versions of PS7 and PS CS2 on my PC which now no longer work.

I have run CCleaner to check the registry for issues and fix them, but no luck.

The message I get when the installation program finished is that Shared components installed successfully, but PS CS3 and Shared Components both failed.

Appreciate any help you can give!

Thanks,

Al.

[Neilzstar]

I now have PS Elements 4.0. But my first experience with PSE was a version provide with an Epson printer. This refused to be reloaded at one time, even though I used the original printer CD, and contact with Adobe provided a number to feed in, but only after my bona-fides were established. Did you at any time change directory names? May have confused things. Good Luck, Hope this may assist. Cheers. Neilzstar

[sheeny (Al)]

Well, it's been a frustrating time, but I've got it working again.

Just in case someone should have a similar problem, here's what I did.

I was having problems as I said (above) so decided to uninstall and re-install PS CS3 to try to straighten it out. I started to uninstall, and got a warning to deactivate CS3 before I uninstall it. I went back into the program to deactivate it, but couldn't find the deactivate option (it's in the help menu apparently!) so I proceeded to uninstall without deactivating. They always say these things, but it never matters, right? Well I don't know, but just maybe if I'd done that I wouldn't have had the trauma I was about to go through!...

After uninstalling, I did the installation... It all looked fine until the very end... then "Shared components were successfully installed" but "Photoshop CS3 and Shared Components Failed".

I tried the installation again with the same result, so I fired up the lappy and started searching the web for clues. Four times I tried to reinstall on the first might without success! After an all points distress call (including IIS), a work colleague dug up some information for me. I downloaded a utility from adobe called CS3Clean - I had run the beta version of CS3 before I got CS3 proper, and apparently it can cause installation problems in CS3, so they wrote a utility to clean it out.

CS3Clean had offers 2 levels of "cleaning", but in fact can do 4 levels. I followed the instructions for each of the first 3 levels, each time without success. I ran CS3Clean on a level 4 clean which I believe removes all adobe products... but part way through I got a blue screen of death!!!

The PC came back up eventually after doing a checkdisk, and recovery from a "serious error"... and all was OK apart from the loss of all adobe software. Too much fun for that night so I packed up.

I took a break of about 2 days before I had another go at it. This time I tried a few other things that people on the web had advised, without success. Eventually I went back to the instructions for CS3Clean and followed them to the letter! But as well as that, prior to running CS3Clean I disabled all my antivirus/spyware software.

I really didn't expect the installation to work, but it did! Not only that, but I had been having problems with some components of my antivirus software not working (and the software company has given up trying to help!) - and now they work too! Hmmm... coincidence???

Al.

[Dennis]

Good onya Al – you must have the patience of a saint and the luck of the Irish – I’m glad it all worked out in the end. Thanks for pioneering the trail as well!

Cheers

Dennis

[sheeny (Al)]

Well...

Since my last post, I've had CS3 breakdown to the point where it's unusable. Period! I tried everything I could find out from the web, and anywhere else I could, but it would simply give an error message and shutdown whenever I tried to open or save a file.

So, in frustration I decided to uninstall it and go back to CS2.

I fired up CS2 after uninstalling CS3... and wouldn't you know it... CS2 was no better. Same problem in fact (or so it looked). I checked the module name that failed on some the errors... Hmmm "uxtheme.dll" seemed by far the most frequent occurrence. So a bit of research on the web to find out what uxtheme.dll is... It is a file that involved in the "theme" that windows displays on the desktop. I also found some instructions on the web for replacing and changing the uxtheme.dll file - some of which sounded quite dubious.

Just because I can, I decided to try changing the windows theme and see if that has an effect. I chose windows classic (I was running a modified version of windows classic - I had changed some colours and sounds). Well, what do you know, CS2 runs perfectly!

Hmmm, OK, I'm game/silly enough... let's install CS3 again! (I think I've nearly done this enough to be able to describe the process over the phone to a blind person).

Well, suffice to say, so far so good!

I now have CS3 up and running again, and it appears to be behaving. I guess sometime in the past few weeks my uxtheme.dll file was corrupted.

I hope this might save someone from the frustration I have experienced over the last few weeks!

Never mind curses about camels, fleas and armpits... a far worse curse would have to involve photoshop not working!

Al.

[Dennis]

Oh man, what a bummer, that’s a really woeful tale – glad you have now managed to fix it – again! Let’s hope that you have nutted out all the problems now.

Cheers

Dennis