Creative Cloud Workarounds: Failure to recognise installed apps or reinstall from Creative Cloud app

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I've been using Creative Cloud since it was first released and it's not always (well, in truth, never really) been a perfect relationship. In the early days there were the syncing bugs that made it impossible to utilise the free cloud storage (which at one point was whisked away for a few months, if I remember correctly), then there was the bug that forced me to reformat an iMac because the Adobe Crash Daemon was eating all the hard-drive space. Now I have a MacBook where the Creative Cloud app refuses to acknowledge the existence of the installed Adobe apps, and any attempt to remove and reinstall results in the install stalling around 42%.

This has left me with two options, a fresh formatting of yet another hard-drive or AirDropping apps from a desktop iMac to the MacBook. I've chosen to AirDrop for now, which has until my latest attempt worked perfectly with simply dragging the AirDropped app folders into Applications. There was just one glitch this time (which was causing InDesign to crash with an error message about ROMAN.TXT missing): AirDrop didn't copy across the files in Resources -> cooltype -> typesupport -> Unicode -> mappings. So I found an alternative way to copy these across (OneDrive).

Now all works as expected again, but I'm not very happy about having to do things in this hacky way because I suspect at some point a reformatting and fresh install is inevitable. And yes I've tried the uninstall and cleaner tools provided by Adobe, and yes I've tried seeking help on the Adobe forums. But life is too short to try and get this resolved in any way except a reformat: that's what worked for the iMac and I know in my blood this is really what the MacBook needs too. So unless Adobe read this and bring out a bullet-proof uninstaller (or app recogniser) then that'll be the path that I'll soon be taking.

Afterlinks

Writing this post made me look again for solutions and it turns out that there are a few possible. solutions.




So I tried the one at the top of the list, and also set the install location under Preferences -> Creative Cloud to /Applications and rebooted before tapping install on one app that wasn't installed (Illustrator) and one that was installed having been AirDropped across (InDesign) but wasn't showing up as having been installed.

Whether the change from /DefaultLocation to /Applications was necessary I don't know (you could try without this step, because by this stage I was chucking the kitchen sink at the problem). The results were that Illustrator installed but InDesign didn't overwrite the existing install. So I guess that I have to remove InDesign, probably rename the .db file again, maybe reboot and then install InDesign. (At the moment I can't be bothered, it works as is, but at least now I have this post to return to when I finally decide to do a proper install when InDesign is next updated.)

For old applications (CC and CC2014) I'm going to have to settle for dragging and dropping the application folders to the Trash, because the Adobe uninstallers for the apps still don't work.

Renaming .db file

  1. Sign out of your Adobe ID by clicking the gear icon in the upper right of the Creative Cloud Desktop app.
  2. From the pop-up menu, choose Preferences. Click the Account tab, and then click Sign Out Of Creative Cloud.
  3. From the same gear icon in Creative Cloud, choose to Quit Creative Cloud.
  4. Rename the OPM.db file that is located in the OOBE folder located here:
    Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe
    Windows XP: \Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe
    Windows 7: \AppData\Local\Adobe
    Change the name to OPM.db.old
  5. Relaunch Adobe Creative Cloud.
  6. Sign back in to your Adobe ID.



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