Friggin' Adobe. Pretty good products that rarely need support. This is good because Adobe support can be terrible, as I just experienced.

I ran into an issue with Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 recently and discovered there was an update available for the product. From the Help menu in Acrobat Pro, I clicked Check for updates... It found the Acrobat update, and 5 other updates for Adobe products installed on my PC.

After installing the update, I tried to run Dreamweaver and received the "Licensing for this product has stopped working" message. Hmm. Tried Photoshop and received the same thing. Same with every program I tried from Creative Suite 3.

After trying multiple recommended fixes from adobe.com, I resorted to calling their technical support department. To put this part in a nutshell, I talked with at least 6 different people (all in India, by the way) and received multiple case numbers.

The big waste of time here is my trying to understand them, them understand me, and always having to confirm my email address, customer number, mailing address, telephone number, etc. even when being transferred within Adobe support. It was ridiculous.

In an attempt to save someone else from hours on the telephone with Adobe, here is how I fixed this issue in Windows Vista Ultimate (32-bit):

1) Make sure you have the serial number for the installed product.
2) Make sure you have the serial number for the eligible product to upgrade from, if applicable.
3) Click Start, click Computer, double-click your boot drive (usually C: ), double-click Program Files, double-click Common Files, double-click Adobe, double-click Adobe PCD, double-click cache. Inside you will find a file called cache.db.
4) Drag cache.db to the desktop.
5) Launch an affected Adobe application.
6) Enter serial numbers, activate, register, blah, blah, blah.
7) Enjoy your Adobe product again.