CS6

Symptoms: Upon launching Adobe CS6 Photoshop 13.0.3 that was installed and updated via packages created with Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition 3.1(AAMEE) on Mac systems it starts the selected Photoshop which will bounce in the dock but then starts Adobe Application Manager(AAM) and exits the app. Then Photoshop is launched again and AAM exits. This continues in a loop that repeats indefinitely until interrupted by a logging out or killing the processes. During this loop the UI will constantly shift focus making direct interactions with the machine difficult.

My personal story with this problem: I believe there is a countdown expiration that occurs prior as these symptoms were not immediately evident upon testing the patch. I actually approved and deployed the patch after testing it on a few machines for a few days. It ran fine in the wild for about ~3 weeks on the end user devices before these symptoms exhibited themselves on a handful of our lab machines. While I was troubleshooting what I believed to be an isolated handful of machines onsite I noticed that a few Mac systems that were able to run Photoshop, suddenly upon exiting and re-opening the app started to exhibit the same problem over a few hours. At the time my thought was ” Ack! Its spreading! Adobe what did you do!” and I began sweating… as I had no idea what was happening. Then came the frantic google searches and the comforting realization that I wasn’t alone and that there was actually already a fix available…. “Phew!”

The Fix: Install latest patches from Adobe for all products(incl. Photoshop 13.0.4 and reserialize the install after ensuring the devices can reach Adobe and VeriSign to reserialize the software.

Steps I took to get this under control:

Create a new updates package in AAMEE that includes Photoshop 13.0.4
Deploy the updates to machines that have Photoshop 13.0.3
Create a package that will reserialize installed CS6 products. Thanks to Greg Neagle for makereserializationpkg.
Test the packages on machines exhibiting the problems while authenticated to allow it to talk to Adobe and VeriSign.
Confer with my network engineer colleagues to ensure that the machines can talk unimpeded to Adobe and VeriSign for serial number verification and activation without authentication to our network.
Deploy the reserialization package

So far I have deployed this to 60 of the affected devices happily the numerous other Mac systems hadn’t gotten patched yet.

I did find a handful of the Mac systems couldn’t be patched. They gave an error message stating something to the effect of the installation failed please contact Adobe for direction. I did not contact Adobe instead I tried the uninstall tool in /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers, which stated there were no installations of CS6. Then I tried the installation “CS Cleaner Tool”, which failed similarly. Next I manually removed all CS6 apps from /Applications. I then deleted items from /Applications/Utilities/ that seemed pertinent to CS6. I then backed up and removed /Library/Application Support/Adobe. I then reinstalled CS6, the patches, and ran the serialization pkg. I found that removing /Library/Application Support/Adobe broke CS5 licensing, and Lightroom licensing but re-entering their serial number got them back on track. Leaving /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Adobe alone did not seem to affect re-installation or patching thankfully.

So far it hasn’t relapsed as some have seen on their Macs. I’ll update this if any snags present themselves.

Your mileage may vary. Good luck.

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