So I’ve just spent three weeks manually updating an Adobe CS3 installation on about 200 MacBooks. And while many problems arose during this maintenance period, nothing was as un-user-friendly or as awful as trying to get Adobe Updater to properly update a CS3 installation. If you find yourself in a similarly unpleasant situation, I hope that this document can help you overcome the multitude of problems that can arise while trying to update CS3.

Note: I’m using a VLA copy of Adobe CS3 at my campus. For those you using single-installs, most of these tips may apply, but you may be having issues with product activation, which I don’t talk about at all in this post.

1. First, you need to make sure that you’re using the most recent version of Adobe Updater available. Sounds simple, right? One would think that if you navigate to /Applications/Utilities and launch Adobe Updater, that it would check against Adobe’s servers and see a newer version and tell you so. Outside from downloading the newerest Adobe Updater (5.1..1.1113) from Adobe’s site, the only way to get Adobe Updater to see the newer version is to first launch Acrobat Pro 8.x and run “Check for Updates” from the Help menu. Doing the same from any other application in the suite will not get the newest version. And without the newest version, Adobe Updater will lie to you, telling you that everything’s up to date when it’s not; specifically Acrobat, which would otherwise remain stuck at 8.0.0.
2. Adobe Updater will often fail when trying to update an installed copy of Adobe Reader 8.x. It will download an update, attempt to run it, and then just quit out, without providing any feedback to the user whatsoever. Since part of this updating process was updating Adobe Reader to v9.1 on my MacBooks, I simply deleted Adobe Reader 8.x to work around this problem. Adobe Reader 9.x uses the AdobeUpdater6 program, not the AdobeUpdater5 program.
3. If the updates to Adobe Acrobat Pro fail, you sometimes have to manually run the updates outside of the Adobe Updater program. If Adobe Updater has already downloaded the updates, you can find them in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Updater5/Install/Acrobat.  This is where Adobe Updater5 installs all of its updates, so if you wanted to capture the updates to the CS3 suite for the purpose of running them individually, or for repackaging into an installer (yay for Casper Composer!), this is where you’d look to get the various updates that Adobe Updater5 runs.
4. Sometimes you have to clear out stale or corrupted updaters. I’ve seen a few occasions where Adobe Updater just borks itself trying to apply an invalid or corrupted update. You can simply delete the entire “Updater5″ folder from the above location and then re-run it and it’ll regenerate all the necessary files and folders and, most importantly, redownload clean copies of the updater(s) that is failing.
5. On a few occasions I had to manually apply the Acrobat 8.1.0 update to Acrobat 8.0.0 in order to get the 8.1.3 update to take. I don’t know why.
6. If the Acrobat Pro Updater continues to say that there are other Adobe applications running and asks you to shut them down before continuing, you’ll have to quit out of the updater, run Acrobat Pro and agree to the nonsense self-healing crap that it throws up. If Acrobat Pro is in the state where it needs to repair itself, then the updates can’t happen. Long story short: make sure that Acrobat Pro can launch without throwing up any of the self-healing dialogue boxes for Word PDF plugins or the AdobePDF printer, and then the Updater will be able to run properly.
7. The Adobe Flash Light and Adobe Air updates take a very long time–as long as 45 minutes on a fast MacBook, and 90+ minutes on a slower PowerBook G4. If you’re running these updates from Adobe Updater instead of manually, know that Adobe Updater isn’t providing you any granular feedback about what stage in the install process it’s in. It gives you only a blue progress bar. And on these loooooong updates, it appears that the Updater has actually stalled. On several occasions, I found my technicians forcequitting or cancelling the Adobe Updater because they believed that it had hung on something. If you wait long enough, these updates will complete. If you run these long updates manually, you’ll recieve better feedback and see that they’re installing many many thousands of HTML and help files, accounting for the very long install.
8. If you install Adobe CS3 fresh on a machine and then run Adobe Updater to get updates (remember to run it from Acrobat Pro’s Help menu), you can expect there to be approximately 600MB of updates. Plan for about 90-120 minutes for all of these to install, per machine.
9. Run Adobe Updater until it says there are no more udpates. At the time of this writing Acrobat Pro was verison 8.1.4, and is only available to install once you’ve gotten Acrobat to 8.1.3.
10. Learn to curse Adobe Updater. It’s very therapeutic. Every day, my coworkers and I would create new ways to curse Adobe Updater. I’m not sure what a wanker or a knobend is, but Adobe Updater is surely one.

Lastly, I’m fondly looking forward to Adobe CS5. Word on the street is that the installer will finally be package-based and we can expect the Updater7 to be a well-behaved application instead of the misbehaving and almost unusable douche-nozzle that it currently is.

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