Adobe Creative Suite 2 and Windows 7 (64bit)
Ever since the Windows 7 RC came out I’ve been testing it at work, and to my great surprise most of the software I run on a daily basis just works. Netbeans, Tortoise, WAMP, they all work as expected. I had not, however, even dared to try Adobe Creative Suite 2 as I’ve heard people complaining about lousy compatibility even under Vista. It all changed today!
I’ve spent the last month with Photoshop/Illustrator only available on my tiny Macbook Air, and I grew tired of it eventually. Since I felt really lucky today I decided to go be an idiot and try to get CS2 up and running in Windows 7 
During the setup my first problem occured – invalid path name. I’m running Windows 7 64bit and it automatically puts 32bit applications in the Programfiles (x86) folder. The CS2 setup wasn’t too happy about it so I changed it to the regular path, C:\Programfiles. CS2 installed as expected – awesome I thought!
I expected Photoshop to keep nagging me about registration over and over again until I ran it as administrator, similar to the problem under Vista. But nay, Photoshop gave me a short error about “user name, organization, or serial number is missing or invalid” meaning it had to terminate without me painting a single pixel. After some research I found that this was a problem that would occur under 64bit versions of Windows XP as well – and the solution for Windows XP 64bit users worked for me!
According to Adobe, you have to get your Creative Suite installation into that x86 directory, and here’s how to do it:
Uninstall Creative Suite completely, when installing again use C:\Progra~2\Adobe as your installation path instead of the one suggested. If your “Next” button is disabled after pasting it, try clicking “Browse” then “Cancel” and it should be reenabled.
I’d also like to point out that I ran my setup as Administrator (browsed to the DVD drive then right clicked setup.exe and chose (“Run as Administrator”) the second time just to be sure.
It worked out quite well actually, hooray!
