Avoid Creative Suite Activation Issues

I recently bought a refurbished Mac Pro to replace my aging G5. It is fast, beautiful, very very sexy, and I would be having an affair with it but all my loved ones know how much I love it, so it’s totally above board.

Installing Creative Suite on a new machine is a chance for fun and games with activation, of course, and I bumped into two nice new (to me) flaws. I’m writing this from memory weeks after the install, but this is how they occurred to the best of my recollection:

I discovered that you must launch Acrobat for the first time before you launch Distiller for the first time. Acrobat has a slightly different activation/serial scheme than the rest of Creative Suite, because it’s not a “proper” part of the Creative Suite. I don’t use Distiller much, but I was curious to see the speed improvement in distilling a large file, so I fired it up … and activation broke. Now, whenever I launched Acrobat, I would get one of those infuriating “Licensing for this product has stopped working” errors.

So I went and downloaded the Licensing Service Update which is listed as a solution for various activation issues for both Creative Suite 3 and Creative Suite 4.

I try to run it, and the Licensing Service Update will not run if you do not have a password set on your OS X user account. I’m assuming this is a simple error in the Python script that launches the update, but this is just pure silliness! (For those of you who are saying “Why do you not have a password on your account?!”—when I am working on a new or freshly-installed machine, I don’t set a password until after I’ve installed all the major pieces of software/updates.) I set a password on the fly and it works just fine.

So, with the explanation of the situation out of the way, here is Advice For Avoiding Activation Wasting Your Time:

1. Install Creative Suite.
2. Launch InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator. Then close it.
3. Launch Acrobat. Then close it.
4. Run the Licensing Service Update. Just in case.
5. Install all the relevant updates for Creative Suite.

It’s too much to hope for, but “No Product Activation” would be a welcome feature in Creative Suite 5; well worth paying for!