CS5 Perpetual Installing as Subscription?

[bbarthel]

A number of years ago, I purchased CS5 Master Collection and installed it. Went smoothly, no problem registering the perpetual license, etc. I used it for years without trouble. Last week, I had a hard drive crash. Now I'm in the tedious process of reinstalling all of my software, including CS5. However, now, when I try to install it, I use the same install files, same serial, but now I get the message that it is installing as the Subscription Edition.

I find this to be a big problem. Setting aside the question of whether or not I should upgrade (I don't want to; I like the perpetual and CS5 does everything I need), I'm absolutely not interested in (and don't see why I should be expected to be) paying monthly for something that I already purchased and have used happily and successfully for years. The perpetual license should be perpetual, no matter when I'm installing it!

OS (Windows 7 64-bit) is the same pre- and post-hard drive crash. I have contacted customer support and they were of little help.

Has anyone else reported this problem? Even more importantly, has anyone figured out a way around this problem? I use at least one of these programs almost every day and am definitely feeling their loss as I hunt for open-source temporary solutions.

[John T Smith · Accepted solution]

Read Cloud takes over https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2089127 for some ideas (see reply #1)

[bbarthel]

That thread was perfect. Thank you for directing me that way. With the help mentioned there, I got CS5 installed and activated. It seems that the problem was an update to Lightroom 6, which subsequently caused everything to move to a subscription model. A complete uninstall of everything Adobe (with the cleaning tools mentioned there), followed by installation of CS5 (now magically getting "Master Collection" instead of "Master Collection Subscription Edition" when I put in the serial), then Lightroom. Finally, locking them all up behind my firewall. A bit of a mess.

Understanding why one software update of one application with a perpetual license (Lightroom) should ever result in corruption of another application's perpetual license (CS5) to a subscription license is another question entirely, not to mention needing specialized software tools to detoxify the system. It sounds like I'm describing vicious malware, not respected legitimate software.

Doesn't change the fact that my question was answered perfectly, though. Thank you!