After migration to new Mac w/ Monterey (12.2.1), I can't uninstall CS3

Question

I've been searching for a relatively easy way to uninstall CS3 premium after a Migration Assistant from a Macbook Pro (El Capitan, 10.11.6) to a new Macbook pro (Monterey 12.2.1). I wished to keep the older system macbook for continued CS3 use, so I didn't uninstall before the migration.

After several days of frustrating research I've tried all of the olnline and Adobe suggestions with no luck. The cleanest unistall should have been using the sanctioned Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool (v. 4.3.0.201). After download and installling, (with the required addtion of Rosetta), authorizing, accepting license, it did find my CS3 version on my system (yay). The only option in the first panel window is to highlight my CS3, then use "Cleanup Selected' button. The next popup window has a non-highlighted buttton option saying "Try Uninstall"... which is worthless, nothing happens. So close to having this uninstall almost do what its supposed to then, Drats!

I've never had a creative cloud account, so any solution from that end is out. I've used Adobe Software professionallly since 1989, and spent thosuands of $'s. Seems I should have some sanctioned way to unistall the software other than manuallly, which is a royal pain and could take days.

Have I missed any updates to this situation? Any suggestions would be extremely appreciated.

Jubilant_Dazzle0B33 · Accepted Answer

Update: 3/17/2022 After endless web searches, no luck with the suggestions here, and emailing back and forth with the Adobe techs directly, the only solution was to semi-manually extract the CS3 files on the new MacBook Pro (2020, MacOS Catalina v. 12.3). I did find a 3rd party uninstaller (Nekony, App Cleaner & Uninstaller, v.7.6.2) that did most of the heavy lifting. I opted for their pro version ($20), which is NOT on the Apple App Store. This uninstaller literally extracted 10's of thousands of files that needed to be eliminated. As a follow-up I used a great long term post from 2011 (Mac Strategy- Manually Remove Adobe CS3). These instructions give a step by step strategy with file names to search for on your MacOS system to manually move to the trash, including all the fonts placed by the original install process. The font files (200+) have to be manually trashed, or using the Mac native app Font Book to delete.  The entire process took over 4 hours to complete. All in all a frustrating experience since the Adobe sanctioned "Creative Cloud Cleaner tool" needs to be seriously updated. Especially for us long time professional legacy users of Adobe products. (I started with Adobe Photoshop v 1.0 in 1989!)

Nancy OShea · Answer

CS3 and the uninstallers are 32-bit apps which won't run on your new OS. Ideally you should have wiped your computer clean of all 32-bits before you migrated to 64-bit architecture.

For the most part, the Adobe CC Cleaner Tool also removes legacy Creative Suite apps. That's the best recommendation I have for you.

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html

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