Any success with adobe creative cleaner tool?

THANK YOU! I used this and it worked for me and my enterprise. I started at 15 and It removed all 15 products. I tried using the uninstall strings and all it did was open the applications, and there's no WMICs

Hey, I'm in the same boat. I need to remove all Adobe products from approximately 3,500 computers. Not all computers have the same thing installed on them. Some have individual appllications, some have suites (of all different versions). So I needed a way to silently uninstall all of these and then deploy CC to all of them (which I can do no problem).

So I have some good and bad news. For some reason, Adobe does not provide documentation with this CC tool. I can only assume it's because they just want to say the tool exists, even though they don't want people to use it. Like Apple products, it's becoming very obvious that Adobe never intended to be in an enterprise setting. Ok, no more rants.

So their documentation says this: AdobeCreativeCloudCleanerTool.exe ‐‐removeAll= CREATIVECLOUDCS6PRODUCTS

That's great if you only want to uninstall CC products, but that's not really what people are wanting to do. Instead, they want to uninstall old CS suites. Adobe does not provide the correct switches for doing this. I chatted Adobe to see if they have any documentation on this, and they were beyond worthless. They literally just said to go to control panel and uninstall Adobe products.

So if you run the tool without any switches, there will be much user interaction. It asks you to choose the language, it asks you if you want to continue, and then asks you which products you want to uninstall. This does not work for those of us who want to do this silently.

The solution is to feed the tool some input. I'll explain how I did it, and then tell you why this tool is trash.

I created a batch file to run this tool. The batch file looked like the following:

start /wait "AdobeCreativeCloudCleanerTool.exe" < remove_all.txt

What I'm doing is inputing this text file. What is this text file you may ask? Don't laugh....

e

y

1

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

y

I literally opened up notepad, and made a .txt that looked like that. Here is what it does:

e - chooses English

y - confirms

1 - chooses all

And then here is the weird part. The countdown. The goal is to again choose "All". However, the number of products that are installed on the system determine what number "All" is. If you guess a number that is not on the list, then it asks you to re-enter a number. To take into account the different possibilities, I start at 9. Let's say you have a few products, and "All" is number 4.

This enters

9 -> "Nope, try again"

8 -> "Nope, try again"

7 -> "Nope, try again"

6-> "Nope, try again"

5 -> "Nope, try again"

4-> "All"

And then the last line is 'y' to confirm again .

So that's the dumb way that I was able to figure out. Now here is why you should not even use this tool.

1) This does not get rid of everything. It's a terrible tool. It just seems to randomly leave things installed, even when you choose "Clean All". It leaves things like Fireworks, Dreamweaver, etc.. But it's not always the same products. It seems random. If you use the switch they give you in the tutorial, it still does not remove all products. It simply does not work.

2) It leaves registry entries for most things, potentially causing future problems if you ever use batch scripts and are checking for the existence of reg keys.

3) Leaves start menu shortcuts. Really? Why does it leave those???

4) Will fail if not run as an admin

5) REQUIRES DOING A COUNTDOWN IN A RANDOM TEXT FILE. Seriously. Leave "All" as the first option always.

This tool is a joke. Don't use it. Adobe needs to come up with a real solution. I have not found a decent way of uninstalling yet. The only thing I can really think of is using the installer MSI and uninstalling based on GUID. For the amount of potential products and the script I would have to write, it would be an absolute nightmare.

TL;DR  This will let you automate this tool. But the tool does not work. Don't use it. Adobe may see it as validation that they have a usable tool, which this is not.