Adobe Updater Crashes on Mac OS X and a Fix

Ok, so if you're like me, you got your Adobe Photoshop CS3 upgrade, and figured all those problems that have been building up from staying with the old Photoshop 7 would be eliminated?

What problems? Oh, all those failures from automatic updates.

So I was rather disappointed when every time I launched Photoshop, Adobe Updater would generate one of those... "This application has crashed unexpectedly would you like to report it to Apple..." dialogs. I even knew there had been some updates made available, but I couldn't get them because Adobe Update would crash anytime it was launched.

I've got a friend who's situation was even worse. His Adobe Updater was set to run on startup, and would crash his entire system every-time it launched.

So what's the solution? Well, it appears that it must be a permission issue with the updater needing to modify files it doesn't have enough access too.

We can solve this by opening Terminal (in your Utilities folder under Applications) and running a unix command line giving it full access to your system.
(Ok the following line displays poorly in the blogger template, however it should be easy to select and then cut and paste into your Terminal app.)

sudo /Applications/Utilities/Adobe\ Utilities.localized/Adobe\ Updater5/Adobe\ Updater.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Updater

Copying and pasting that into Terminal should cause it to ask for your password. Go ahead and type in your password. Now that should launch the updater app. Assuming you have admin rights and can use sudo, the application should have all the power over you system it needs to complete an update. I had to take a further step and install some updates separately. I think I had about 6 or 7 updates to install, and I'd always get an update failed message when I tried to do all of them. However, I did them one at a time, and eventually everything installed.

Now when Adobe Updater auto launches on my system, it no longer crashes. Yea!

I wish Adobe would spend as much time perfecting their updater app, as they have on their software. Aside from being a resource hog, Photoshop CS3 rocks!

Update: With this blog posting it would appear Adobe is aware of the issues, however, it doesn't imply they'll be able to solve them.

Update 2: Although this blog posting is more to do with the installer rather then the updater it sure points out that Adobe's weak link is in developing their installers.

Props go to Sjan.E in the Adobe user forums for the suggestion of using sudo in this thread.