Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 Activation Problem Workaround
A little while ago I bought Adobe Creative Suite CS4 Design Standard so that I could use Photoshop and Acrobat Pro on my Windows 7 machine (which I use for photo editing and organizing). Installing, registering, and activating the 64-bit version was painless, except for one problem: whenever I launched Acrobat, it would work fine for a few seconds until I was interrupted by an annoying dialog box which stated: “Adobe Acrobat was installed as part of a suite. To enable Adobe Acrobat, please start another component of this suite (such as Adobe Photoshop).” After clicking “Ok” Acrobat would shutdown.
Needless to say, this made the Acrobat part of my installation useless. Strangely, the dialog persisted even if I was already running Photoshop when I started Acrobat. I tried deactivating and reactivating, reinstalling, and so forth — all to no avail.
Google didn’t seem to have any advice on the matter, so I gave in and tried calling technical support. Though the representative was nice, he unfortunately didn’t have an immediate solution to the problem. I kept playing around with my installation and stumbled across something that worked — instead of running the 64-bit version of Photoshop, I ran the ordinary version (it is installed in your start menu alongside the 64-bit version). Ever since then Acrobat has worked fine (even when it is the only Adobe product running)!
It seems like the 64-bit version of Photoshop doesn’t properly communicate the activation details to Acrobat — a pretty bizarre (and annoying) bug for an Adobe product (which I am usually very fond of). Thankfully, the workaround is pretty simple — just run the regular version of Photoshop (presumably running Illustrator or any of the other programs in the suite would also do the trick).
Thankyou for this solution. very helpful as this was driving me crazy.
Thank you, this was really bugging me. Thinking back to when I did the install, I even considered not installing the 32 bit version of Pshop at the time (why would I need that when I have 64-bit?) but installed it anyway.
I’m glad I did! This is a great quick way to fix an annoying issue.
This doesn’t work. I think my problem has to with a botched uninstall of CS4, because I am using CS5, and don’t see anyone with CS5 having this problem. I have tried all of the above-mentioned. Oh well..
@Jeff
Shucks, I guess the new version has new problems. Best of luck figuring out the latest puzzle.
I just got the same issue with CS5. I chatted with an Adobe technical person and we found out that the “FLEXnet Licensing Service” and “FLEXnet Licensing Service 64″ (64 bit version) services were both “Disabled”. Setting them both to “Manual” did the trick – after opening Photoshop (regular version) and then opening, closing and printing to the Adobe Printer a few times. It took about 10 minutes and everything returned to normal. Hope this helps!
@Marc
That fixed my problem!
I had a similiar issue with Design Premium CS5 & Acrobat Pro on Windows 7 64bit. The problem occured after my graphics card died and was replaced, the software decided to deactivated itself (previously, it all worked fine)
As Marc mentioned above, changing the “FLEXnet Licensing Service” to automatic solved my problems instantly!
Thanks again to Marc for posting this info – really appreciated!
THANK YOU!!
@Dwain: Hmm.. no joy here. I have CS5, I tried reinstalling Acrobat to no avail, I have done a search for FLEXnet to no avail, and there’s no 32-bit version of Photoshop CS5 that I can find anyway. How does one change the FLEXnet Licensing? Thanks so much!
thank you so much! i thought i was gonna go crazy trying to figure this out! wow….adobe really should address this.