Is there a way around the Adobe Creative Cloud installer?

This may be all over the place, but here goes:

I was so excited to finally be able to purchase the Creative Suite, only to be reminded of the difficulties I experienced years ago trying to download Photoshop and Lightroom through the Creative Cloud installer.

It took a very long time and I experienced many hiccups.

Now I want to be able to download the rest of the suite, but my installer is teasing me with an "Installing Update..." screen that pops up everytime I click on the installer. SO my issue is, I want to go ahead and begin the download process but the installer is not cooperating.

Perhaps this is a naive question, but is there any other way to install the apps so I don't have to deal with whatever issues are happening with the installer??

By the way, I tried the following:

1. Restarting the computer (the installer still tries to do its painfully slow or non-existent update process upon return)

2. Uninstalling the app in order to use the Adobe Cloud Cleaner thing (but I really don't want to have to uninstall the creative cloud apps I already have installed (photoshop, lightroom) because I DO NOT want to risk trying to download them again and have the process stall, and I can't uninstall the installer without losing those apps apparently)