GPO issue with Adobe Acrobat / Reader

Report · May 12, 2010

Hello,

I am trying to deploy out Adobe Pro 9 via GPO and when installing on clean machine there are no issues. However, we have machines with Adobe Standard 6.0, Adobe Reader 8.1.2, or actually both (ugh). Simply removing the MSD group for these older GPO's does not completely uninstall all the files and registry entries - this is then causing a "fatal error installing..." in event log when the new GPO tries to deploy, and causes it to fail. Despite all the reccomendations the only way I can get the new GPO to deploy is by going into the registry manually and searching /removing every single reference of Adobe.

Does anyone know of a more efficient method to allow the new GPO to deploy, or are the KB articles the only known options (which unforutnately did not work for me).

Thanks for any help -

Andy

Report · May 13, 2010

Hi Andy,

I sympathize with your situation but can't offer much help. Adobe doesn't support 7.x now let alone 6.x. Further, GPO was really designed to manage registry settings and was never designed to manage full installs--especially over multiple, older versions of legacy products. You may have script your way to cleaning all the old reg keys and legacy files before installing.

The new way to handle deployments on Windows is SCCM. Microsoft recommends SCE for smaller businesses (http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/essentials.aspx). SCCM is far more powerful and provides an amazing set of features beneficial to managing clients across the enterprise.

Ben

Report · May 13, 2010

Ben

Thanks for reply - I am actually looking into a script to hopefully facilitate it - we have over 150 machines... wish there was enough time to figure out the exact keys that have to be removed and ignore the rest.

Even uninstalling the Adobe products via add/remove does not come close to removing everything. SCCM is on our horizon too.

Thanks again!

Report · May 21, 2010

Hi Luke,

Yeah, I know. Uninstalling software rarely removes everything (it should). This won't help you, but Adobe is building an uinstall (cleaner) tool which should be out soon. I think it's only 9.x and later.

Ben

Report · May 23, 2010

Ben,

Thanks for info - we may be able to simply get it on Citrix too, so we'll see. There have been instances where everything was manually removed from registry/file structure, and it still won't install, other times it works, very frustrating. Take it easy

Andy (Luke)