2012-01-22

Creative Suite 5.5 refuses to accept a serial number to end trial mode

My wife recently upgraded to a MacBook Air, and when I went to install CS 5.5 on the MBA it accepted the serial number during installation but then would bring up the Adobe Application Manager screen when you started any CS application asking to either run in trial mode, or enter a serial number. And it wouldn't take the serial number that it had just accepted during installation. Yay!

So to spare anyone else the multiple chat sessions with Adobe support, with multiple escalations per session, here's how to fix it.

  1. Quit all your CS applications
  2. Open a terminal window.
  3. sudo -s
  4. cd '/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PCD'. You'll see a cache directory in there. Don't delete it like the tech support guy tells you to (Out of paranoia, I renamed mine instead), that'll trigger a message when you try to start a CS app telling you to reinstall CS.
  5. cd cache - you'll find a file named cache.db rename it to cache_broken.db.
  6. Open one of your CS applications. It'll ask you for the serial and this time, it'll accept it.


Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Copyright 2007-2010, Joseph P. Block, Some Rights Reserved.

Creative Commons Logo