Before even trying this, I’ve had problems with the CS5 updater for months, on both computers — Adobe Device Central and Illustrator updates both fail with these messages:

Adobe Device Central CS5.0.1
Installation failed

Adobe Illustrator CS5 15.0.1 Update
Installation failed

Other updates install just fine.

The installer and updater is much nicer in CS5, though!

One thing that is different with on my computer, however, is that right now there is a folder named “Adobe” along side my CS5 folders (I installed Ps and Ai into my Applications folder). Inside of “Adobe” sits “Adobe Help.app” and a folder called “AdobePatchFiles”.

Within “AdobePatchFiles” are several folders ranging from a couple Mb to one that is >100Mb. I am assuming that this is where the actual patches are stored, the largest being the first update, and is not a temporary folder like the one found here.

Has anyone else seen this with CS5 and can confirm my suspicions?

My experience with CS4 has included deleting the PatchFiles directory and then applying more patches on top of it without incident.

I better not risk it though I have almost 3 gigs in nonsense on my drive.

Even if that directory was deleted, the exact version of every Creative Suite app is included in the info.plist file that is inside each application package — that’s a far more logical place for the updater to look to find what version the current install is.

After all, the mere presence of the .AdobePatchFiles directory doesn’t perfectly indicate if the patch was installed, I don’t believe … a crash during the install would leave the entire directory there, with only some files applied.

That all said, if you ran into some future problems and told Adobe tech support that you’d deleted said files, I’m sure that they would say “We don’t know if that may have caused your problem, and we don’t advocate doing that, so you’re out of luck.”

(Adobe have popped into Dirty Words before to tell me when I was full of shit — politely and professionally — and they’ve yet to do so for this post …)

However, I think it’s worth a warning that one should have their original CS4 disks, and probably a backup before attempting anything like this: patch files, as one might expect, keep track of the differences between different versions of your CS apps. Deleting these files could cause future CS app updates to fail.