Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Fixing Adobe Master Collection CS4 on Windows 7 64bit...again

I am cleaning up and have decided to try again to get some more of CS4 working.  As a background, I purchased CS4 some time ago, then updated to Windows 7 64bit Enterprise and re-installed CS4.  At that point the pain began.  Most of the Adobe tools crashed on startup... the ones that reported an error often pointed at one of the plug-ins.  My conclusion is that many of the plug-ins do not like the 64bit architecture and were probably compiled for 32bit.  Rocket Science....  

Generally, I have been using this process:

1) Start the Application from the Master Collection... crash. (Sometime with an error message)
2) Cut the Plug-in directory from the application directory and past it somewhere else.
3) Re-start the application (often now works)...
4) Re-introduce the plug-ins bit by bit to eliminate the ones that cause a crash (often a number of them).


The result being that I have most of the basic functionality of the tools but without some of the plugins.  This is not ideal, as I paid a lot of cash for the whole toolkit... but its what I have to work with until some mythical upgrade in the future.

I had considered doing a clean uninstall, running the Adobe Cleanup tool and trying a new install but the chance of it bouncing and having to go through the mad drama I had last time has too high a cost to bare.

For instance, below is my debug of Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended 64bit

Plug-ins
 - Panels  (works)
- Measurements (works)
- Import-Export (works)
- Image Stacks (works)
- Filters (Works)
- File Formats (Works)
- Extensions (Broken)
----- FastCore.8BX (Works)
----- MMXCore.8BX (Works)
----- MultiProcessor Support.8BX (Works)
----- ScriptingSuport.8li ( BROKEN )
- Effects (Works)
- Automate (Works)
- ADM (Works)
- 3D Engines (Works)

 The scripting plug-in has been the cause of crashes on a number of other products and tends to be my first suspect in everything else.

A funny thing just happened.

On the Help Menu for Photoshop 64bit there was no "Update" option.  Then after opening the "System Info" item  and closing that dialog... suddenly the Update option appeared.

Photoshop has been weird on the 11.0.2 update.  It constantly wants to download and install the update but the update will not stick.  Photoshop always shows version 11.0.1.  When I manually downloaded and installed the update,(11.0.2) it claims that its already installed.  Running Update from the help menu just does it all again and seems to silently fail the update.

But when I run the Update option from the Now working Photoshop CS4 64bit.  There is a new patch waiting in addition to the usual 11.0.2 patches for the 32bit and 64bit versions of photoshop.  This patch seems to have installed and worked.. however 11.0.2 is still pending. 

There are some comments on the adobe forum about fixing this problem with the Cleaning tool but its such a huge risk that it may trash my whole installation that I am just not ready to do it.  I have tried updating Adobe Updater and that did nothing.  I think the patch is just silently failing. 

Adobe After Effects CS4

Same problem as above:
- Plug-ins
---- (I forget which sub-folder)
--- Scripting.AEX (Broken)

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