Photoshop CS3 and hating on beta users

[Post exists because I can't find much information about this anywhere outside of Adobe]

"Adobe Photoshop CS3 cannot be installed because it conflicts with: Adobe Photoshop CS3"

It turns out that if you had the Photoshop CS3 Beta installed, the release version doesn't play nice. Various knowledgebase articles just say "uninstall the beta first", which makes sense and is easily done. However, further down the page, it's "you must deactivate the beta before you uninstall it". By the time you've gotten this far, you've already uninstalled it, and your system is now in this hideous state where CS3 can't be installed. There's a KB article listing out the directories and zillion registry entries you can manually remove to make it work, but unfortunately, after an afternoon of digging around trying to find keys like ' HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\38E97B37B094D0640B6DC2B737893052', it still doesn't actually work. Adobe says they'll have a cleanup script for Windows available 'soon', though I've heard that the warez community has already released one, which has to hurt given that this problem was caused by the copy protection system.

Nothing like spending $650 on a company's flagship product only to be told that it will work 'soon' all because of some pain-in-the-butt activation system; even Vista was better than this. I feel sorry for the engineer or team whose fault this was, and it's easily imaginable that their QA processes could've missed this. I guess this is the punishment for forgetting what 'Beta' really means.

On the other hand, the direct-download purchase from Adobe.com was super easy, and didn't require local installation of some 'Adobe download manager', so bonus points for that (though having to pay extra for a PDF manual seems a bit off).

[Update: the CS3Clean for Windows is now available. Let's hope it works]

[Update2: Nope. @!#!@$!%@!@!#@!]

[Update3, May 1]: After spending a week getting no useful answers from Adobe support, I ended up reformatting and reinstalling Vista. What a great experience.