Hi J,
Cant put it in a nutshell, unfortunately. As written on a couple boards now, been trying to install Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection since January 22nd. Adobe claims only a few people have had this problem, but you go to their OWN website, as well as, countless others and IT professionals and programmers will flat out tell you there's a problem with the installer package and you will quickly see it's not a few people, not a few hundred people, it's THOUSANDS of people who received discs with a faulty installer package on it.
When I bought the software and had free tech support, Adobe would have to do remote access to install it and it would take between around 4 hours and usually 2 days of calls/remote access and they knew what they were doing. They had to go to the registry and change things, well, the list was long on the procedure they would take. But, Adobe will not even let you PAY them for tech support to get it installed since they moved to CS6 Cloud. So you have to be as smart as Adobe software engineers and MS engineers to successfully install it. I am an above average user, but not that good! I have researched so much my head is ready to explode or something. The problem is that I have had the computer for 2 years and was about to take 2 online classes starting February 5th and decided to do a fresh install of Windows. What a friggin mistake! Had to drop the classes. I have done nothing but work on this day in and day out since Jan 22nd. On Jan 26th, I wrote a well-written letter to Adobe Corp feedback and did get a call from an Adobe techie, he said there, installed and I had 14 errors, 14 warnings and so on. I asked him to stay with me while I update, because even that was not working before. It initialized, we said bye and sure enough, after 40 minutes it failed. Their answer at that point is manually download/install every component, even though some components are NOT on the download pages.
Point is, I did another system image restore and finally decided to use Shane's software and there were problems after that. Then we got that fixed. So I went to hidden Admin with networking and got Adobe installed, did a manual install of the application manager and successfully updated, activated and can use every Adobe program. However, when I came back to my user account, all hell broke loose. So I was panicked cause I sure did not want to re-do EVERYTHING again. As you can see above, I got most all of it fixed but Shane asked me to run ADWCleaner for his curiosity, so I did. He, as well as a lot of people thought maybe virus or rogue 3rd party software. But as you can see, my system is pretty clean.
Now, just like everyone tells me, ohhh just run it and let it do it's thing...so I listen and end up back at square one again. Even though tweaking tool was not supposed to upset anything, some software did not like it. In recent past, people said to run CCleaner and doing that ruined a lot of stuff on the computer. So for all I know, these things ADWCleaner found, are also very important components for IE and FF to work and if that's the case, I do not want to touch them. Afterall, even just doing a scan, without any actions, ADWCleaner, completely ruined CleanMem, S-Bar and a few other applications. So I had to uninstall and reinstall all of them. So why would I just tell this thing to remove those links it found? LOL
UPDATE:
1st IE Key is part of my ixquick search engine so I am not sure I should delete that
2nd IE Key is Norton's toolbar that is an add-on from Norton's 360 suite (Shane knows it was causing my cntrl +F to quit working, and I disabled it, but since it's part of the program-not a single item I can uninstall in add/remove programs, not sure I can successfully delete that without repercussions?
3rd, 4th, 5th just 64-bit but unsure why the one is repeated twice, as it only shows once in the regedit.
Mozilla-that is part of my search engine, so going backwards, I figure I should not delete the C:\ entry either since it's something to do with Mozilla profile, plug-ins?
UPDATE:
I think I finally have everything running correctly...hoping. I did have a couple other glitches happening but seem to have fixed them as well. The worst part was having to reinstall all my apps after installing Adobe and then having to reinstall them after ADWCleaner...I only scanned-never told it to take any actions. GRRR LOL
I am not going to delete those items that ADWCleaner tagged. I found that one Mozilla file and it had all my bookmarks and everything in there so no way I am going to delete that.
I made a system image on 3 external hard drives to "try" to ensure plenty of backup options in case of a fail somewhere. LOL
Thanks Shane!