Solution for error 1603 with Adobe products:
If you received an error 1603 while installing Adobe products, this is how to solve the problem. First I'll describe how and when this error occured on my computer and what I did to solve this problem and didn't work so you can compare stories and see of we're talking about simular situations. Then i'll describe what I did to make it work. If you want to go straight to the solution, just scroll down.
I bought a brand new laptop just a week ago, An Acer Aspire 7730G with a one terabyte harddisk, 4 gigs of ram and a Pentium 2,27 Mhz dual core processor and Windows Vista Home Premium. I installed the Adobe cs4 Master Collection without errors the first time. but Dreamweaver didn't work properly and I decided to reïnstall Dreamweaver. After this it still didn't work and I decided to remove the entire Master Collection and reïnstall it.
During this second install all smaller components and presets installed without problems but all major components (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc.) failed and the install Manager displayed error 1603. The Adobe support page was very breef on this subject and suggested not enough disk space and a conflict with Google Desktop. This wasn't the case, I had 800 GB of space free but did remove Google Desktop, without the desired result.
After that I tried a whole lot of other stuff, found on various blogs and websites, of which none of this worked. Among these solutions were:
- Turning of User Accounts
- turning of firewalls, virusscanners and all other software
- cleaning the registry
- running Windows Installer cleanup
- running Adobe cs3 and cs4 cleanup scripts
- emptying all the temp-folders
- deleting all remains of Adobe programs and folders
I also tried installing the cs3 Master collection to see of the problem was caused by the cs4 pack but got the same error. Besides this I tried 3 different cs4 Master Collections to exclude an error in the installation files. This also gave the same error. Then I installed, removed and reinstalled the cs4 Master Collection on another computer wich had Windows XP as operarting system and again: error 1603. So the error occured with different Adbobe products on different computers with different operaring systems (both Windows though - XP and Vista).
the solution:
Finally, after more then 30 hours of frustration and serious thoughts about switching to Apple I found the problem.
What happens when you install a product on a Windows system and remove it is that all kinds of files and directories aren't removed, the same reason Windows computers get slower and slower and the harddrive's capacity decreases over time which finally forces you to reinstall Windows once and a while. That happened with the Adobe Master collection to. I removed all Adobe files and directories every attempt after removing the adobe suite first but failed to notice the rather large amount of Adobe files in the following directory: c:\program files\common files.
When I removed these files and the Adobe directories in that path, the install worked perfectly. It was in that directory where a file from previous installations conflicted with every new attempt to reinstall it.
I hopes this works for you and you get it running. In my endeavours to solve this problem i ran into so many people with the same annoying problem that I decided to take the time to publish my solution to help my fellow frustrated Windows users. I hope this message also get's some people moving at Adobe and Microsoft. THIS IS EXACTLY WHY MORE AND MORE PEOPLE SWITCH TO APPLE - GET IT RIGHT!
