Upgrading Adobe CS4 to CS5 17th May 2010

I used to use Adobe CS4 Design Premium, last week I ordered the Adobe CS5 Web Premium Upgrade. I kinda screwed up the installation but did run into a few things that might hit other people going the upgrade route.

• Close all your open apps including browser windows. Don’t attempt to do anything during the install as if any of the Adobe shizzle is in use whilst it’s being installed or uninstalled then you effectively can hang the Adobe installer.
• CS5 doesn’t uninstall CS4. I had to uninstall both after the first “upgrade” as uninstalling CS4 after installing the upgrade means it also removes some of the things CS5 installed!. Lesson to learn here, uninstall the old version first. I chose to leave my preferences for CS4 after the uninstall since I wasn’t sure if the CS5 upgrade would look for those.
• Installation of the Flash Player 10 Plugin kept failing. It would hold up the installer so that the estimated time would just keep increasing. I left it overnight by accident and saw it at about 3500 minutes remaining. The simple fix for this if it hits you mid install is to CTRL-ALT-DEL to task manager and look for the installer that says it’s for the Flash Player 10 Plugin. I forced that to close which then prompted the CS5 installer to continue. At the end it does complain that some components failed, meaning the FP10 one.
• An alternative would be to look through each of the apps listed at the start of the installer and untick all instances of the FP10 plugin. I haven’t done this so I don’t know if it has its own set of repurcusions.
• Visit Adobes Get Flash page and install the FP10 plugin manually.
• Fire up one of the apps like Flash CS5 and then choose Help->Updates and start the updates going.
• Restart and you should be done.