Illustrator CS installer -- what a piece of crap!

[Mike_Brazil@adobeforums.com]

Adobe's products just get sloppier and sloppier. Last week, I started having a problem with Illustrator 10 where it seemed to have scrambled the default keyboard layout. Almost every key on the keyboard was mapped to a different character. I tried the repair option, and that didn't help. I tried uninstalling completely and then reinstalling, but that didn't help either. When I called tech support, they told me that, even though I had never requested support for Illustrator 10 before, that they would not provide any support for it unless I paid them $39 per instance or $159 a year. What a bunch of dishonest, greedy bastards they've become!!!!

I decided that, if I had to give Adobe some more money, I might as well get something for it (I didn't have much faith that they'd fix the problem anyway), so I ordered the Illustrator CS upgrade. Wanting to keep unnecessary junk files off my hard drive, I completely uninstalled Illustrator 10 in preparation for installing Illustrator CS. When I ran the Illustrator CS upgrade installer and pointed it to the Illustrator 10 CD for authentication, it couldn't find the CD (my guess is that it's hard-coded to look for the CD in the D drive, which is a hard-drive partition on my system -- it doesn't give you an option to point it to the CD).

After calming down a bit and getting my blood pressure back under control, I reinstalled Illustrator 10 and then attempted to install Illustrator CS again. This time, I got past the authentication step by telling it to look on the hard drive. It finished the installation (supposedly) with no more problems. However, when I tried to start Illustrator, it aborted with an error part-way through -- it told me that a plugin couldn't complete because of an "unknown error." When I looked for the plugin (ArtConverters.aip), it hadn't been installed, but there was one from Illustrator 10 called "Art Converters.aip". I deleted that one and ran the installer again, choosing the Repair option. It took a lot longer for the Repair process to complete than the original installation. Then, when it was done, I tried to run Illustrator again. I got the same error message, but this time it listed a few other plugins instead of ArtConverters.aip. When I clicked OK, Illustrator continued to load. I searched for the plugin files it had listed and then copied them from the Plugins folder to the Required folder where the ArtConverters.aip file ended up, but there was one file that wasn't anywhere on my system: Transform Art.aip.

At this point, I gave up and uninstalled both versions again. Unfortunately, every time I uninstall Illustrator 10, it screws up Windows Explorer, so I then have to restore my system to a previous restore point, which also restores all the Illustrator registry keys.

This time, I'm going to try installing Illustrator 10 on a different partition from the one I was going to use, and then try the Illustrator upgrade to the partition I want. Maybe this will work. If it doesn't, I'll have to call tech support, and this pisses me off, because it starts the 90-day clock on my free support, and the problems are quite obviously in the abominably poor installer that Adobe is using.

[Mike_Brazil@adobeforums.com]

Well, I finally got it to work, but it sure was a hassle.