David Underhill » bug http://dound.com dound's space on the web Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:57:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 Activation Problem Workaround http://dound.com/2010/01/acrobat-pro-9-activation-problem-workaround/ http://dound.com/2010/01/acrobat-pro-9-activation-problem-workaround/#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:27:51 +0000 David Underhill http://dound.com/?p=237 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).

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