Cannot install Photoshop CS3 - Installer just dissappeared

Well,

I have been at this for 10 days now and getting fustrated.
Trying every solution possible and re-installing xp pro. Every time the install quietly exists, The log the installation leaves quits at the same place. When it tries to look at the installed MSI applications, Instead of listing all the existing installs on your machine, it just quits. The event viewer tells me every time that the adobe installer has completed successfully. HA !
Why dod ADOBE change their installer from the Beta, it worked flawlessly for me and still does.
Contrary to some of you, my adobe support techs are of no use, and generally get told by supervisors I suppose to have me format C:
UNACCEPTABLE. All other Adobe products install no problem including Acrob 8 just purchased.
I would be curious is your install logs PF\Common files\Adobe Installers stop at the same point as mine last line being "MSI Installed Products" (should be listing all programs..) I dont know why Adobe wants to find out what programs I am running....I guess they never use this log and have never asked me about its content.
Good luck to all with the same problem

I found the problem you are all having installing CS3 in Vista.
If you need any more help contact me via my web site where I'm more than happy to help you. contact me -> http://www.htmlblock.co.uk

Manually register the jscript.dll file.

On Windows Vista32:

1. Choose Start > All Programs > Accessories.
2. Right-click the Command icon, choose Run As Administrator, and authenticate.
3. Navigate to Windows\System32.
4. At the prompt, type regsvr32 jscript.dll and press Enter.
5. When a dialog box with the message "DllRegisterServer in jscript.dll succeeded" appears, click OK.

On Windows Vista64:

1. Choose Start > All Programs > Accessories.
2. Right-click the Command icon, choose Run As Administrator, and authenticate.
3. Navigate to Windows\SysWow64.
4. At the prompt, type regsvr32 jscript.dll and press Enter.
5. When a dialog box with the message "DllRegisterServer in jscript.dll succeeded" appears, click OK.

I found the solution to the problem after looking though log files and I found an error with the code 2739. So no cleanup or all that rubbish, just follow steps above and CS3 will install as well as CS2 did!

Philip Smith
Founder of HTMLBlock.co.uk

ENJOY :)

A continuation to my story. After my last report, CS3 stopped working. I spent a couple of days talking to Adobe tech support but we just couldn't get the new CS3 installed. All sorts of other things happened during the fix up: lost my audio, lost my wireless connectivity, lost my Wacom tablet function. I finally had to do a repair reinstall Windows XP, reinstall all security updates and then try the setup once again. There were many steps that we went through (I can't remember them all) before we finally got the installer to run. Once the installer started, it took maybe 40 minutes for the program to install. The progress bar just seemed not to move. I just went away and let it go. Finally, installation finished and now the program works as it should. I had to have some help to get the audio back and I found out how to re-connect and the tablet works again. (whew). I would say that it takes a lot of perseverance. The Adobe techs were great in trying to get things to work but my listening ear is a bit sore. I hope you can get yours to work.

Hello, i had the same problem of the installer suddenly disappearing, all i can say is that after days of trying everything (except formatting)somehow i was able to install.

Things i've been doing before it miraculously didn't vanished were: using mirc, msn, firefox with lots of tabs, using windows installer cleanup and removing adobe setup, trying to open setup.exe with poweriso 3.7 (i know i was frustrated), then i doubleclick setup.exe and it didn't disappeared.

I know im not of much help, but i want to tell you that there is hope to that issue.

Boy, these threads sound like my day yesterday trying to get CS3 extended installed on my laptop. The installation on my desktop went without a hitch. I got the same install window that would close after it got through doing whatever it was doing. I spent half the day yesterday talking to 3 different techs at Adobe and still no luck. The last tech told me that he thought it was a conflict with the OS (Winxp Home) but I just didn't have the patience by that time to wipe out my hard disk to get a program to install. I tried everything that the techs told me. My computer was a mess. Finally, before I went to bed, I hooked my desktop and laptop together with a laplink USB cable and ran PCmover to copy my entire desktop hard drive over to the laptop. It took all night to move all over but this morning I had a working CS3. All I had to do was re-activate it and that went quickly. Finally, I had to remove all of the stuff from my desktop that I didn't want on my laptop. That is my story. (whew)

I am still trying to install my cs3 on XP pro SP2. Tried even to load it under diagnostic mode with just windows installer running. Same "silent exit" from setup.exe dialog box after initialization of files. Whats frustrating is that I dont get any error messages. It does leave an install log which I have forwarded to Adobe, but still waiting for an intelligent answer.
The last one was to make sure I cleared my Temp files and had enough disk space. Argh!!
It will be a week now since I purchased this upgrade, obviously not worth the price.

I finally got CS3 to install last night, I decided to vanilla install XP sp2 from scratch using a ghost copy.

I then ran the installer from the same physical disk but diffrent partition and I got 2 errors, CS3 and shared components failed to install. I was just about to throw the towel in, having cleanned my pc back to nothing but base XP sp2 install and then I thought why not put the whole 460mb package on the root or C:.

I ran the installer and uncompressed the file, which created the installer and executed. The options screen popup (at last!!) and I chose the default install location and few minutes later, CS3 was installed and running.

I then spent the next couple of hours updating XP with 80+ security patches, IE7 and all my other applications.

This may seem a bit drastic, but I can only conclude that this problem had nothing to do with CS3beta but rather a conflict with one or some XP security updates / patches.

Also, there must be something inherently wrong with the CS3 installer scripts, perhaps absolute rather dynamic file addressing as it just would not work if I put the installer on a different drive.

I've burnt nigh on 20 hours on this upgrade and finally have it running.

Focusing on the positives, my pc is running a lot quicker and has less bloatware than before, however getting a PC to be stable takes a lot of time and effort, which I now have to contend with. In fact, IE 7 is already crashing more than it did previsouly!

Looking on the bright side, I finally have access to my CS3beta PSDs with LR working in harmony.

I do hope others can solve the problem in a less drastic manner. For me, I felt it better to work from a know XP build to isolate the many variables.

I have just been through a five-hour nightmare of installing Photoshop CS3, and appear finally to have a successful installation. I had the same problem reported here: start setup, a small dialog saying it was initializing appears and progress bar advances. Dialog disappears and nothing more happens.

I deactivated and uninstalled the CS3 beta. Install of Photoshop CS3 from the distribution DVD failed. Then I went down some long involved rabbit holes! The CS3 cleanup script wouldn't run because the Windows Installer Cleanup utility wasn't installed. Downloaded the latest version of that, and it wouldn't install complaining about a VBScript error. Lots of searching the web for solutions to that, including massive permission changes to the registry, which didn't work. Ended up restoring the registry to a previous state, then found an older version of Windows Installer Cleanup utility that would install.

Ran CS3Cleanup levels 1 and 2 and install still wouldn't work.

Before giving up for the night, I tried copying the Adobe CS3 folder from the DVD to a hard drive and ran setup from there. Got the same progress window and then finally a regular window telling me to stop firefox and retry. I did, and setup ran to completion.

What's really bizarre is that although I started setup from the hard drive copy, the DVD was spinning throughout the installation. This suggest to me that installation was occurring from the DVD even though I had started it from the hard drive.

So it appears that copying the Adobe CS3 folder to a hard drive was the magic incantation that worked for me.

I am running Vista Ultimate x64 with a core 2 duo e6700 and 8800GTX OC. Same problem as everyone else being that the setup executables wont load. Quick loading bar then it dissapears.

I am running Windows XP. I tried to install Photoshop CS3. Two drives would not recognize the disk yet they recognized other disks. An external drive did, but I had the same problem as Pipkin (#10) did. ...only a few shared components were installed. I had turned off my virus software...tried installing from the desktop...don't have Zone Alarm on my machine. I installed Lightroom last week, and it installed fine. I used "Add and Remove Programs" to remove any trace of CS3 before trying to install it yet another time. My version is an "Upgrade" and the latest version I have on my machine is CS2. I am not a Techie so I am not going to wipe my computer clean.