Adobe CS3 Dreamweaver Error “Licensing has stopped working”

This is what I get now whenever trying fire up Dreamweaver or Photoshop CS3.  It all started when I got my laptop back from Toshiba warranty repair.  They merely replaced the blue ray player and the battery, so after checking with them, there was nothing they did that could cause this.  Adobe has now gone to the “Creative Cloud” meaning you can “rent” their products instead of buy them.  I already use the CC version of Photoshop and Lightroom which I get for $9.99/month but to have the latest Dreamweaver they charge another $30/mo… $360/year and that’s not to own!  Out of the question, especially since most of my websites are now WordPress so I don’t need Dreamweaver nearly as much as I once did.

Of course I went through uninstall then re-install, with no change.  Then I called Adobe.  What a joke.  They no longer give chat or phone support for any of their old products, only CC stuff.  They said I had to go to the forum.  Like I’m going to get a quick answer there.  At any rate, I found many, many people have the same problem and it would happen for absolutely no reason, no change to the computer, no new files etc…. just one day they would get this error message.  You would think Adobe would have the perfect answer to solve this let alone, why the heck it happened in the first place.  The forum showed  more complaints on Macs than PCs (however, it could be that more Photoshop is installed on Macs than PCs).

The meatiest solution was nine solutions, of which the 9th was to call Adobe support, which of course is useless since they do not support CS anything any longer.  So I tried all 8 solutions, many of which had to do with permissions on the FLEXnet folder.  I must have uninstalled and installed 5 or 6 times.  Nothing worked.  I went back to the forum and tried everything else that was listed until I exhausted all possible solutions.  Very frustrating indeed.  And I will be damned if I will pay Adobe $360/year just to use their web editor.  This was about 4 hours of messing around.

So I searched up “alternatives to dreamweaver” on Google.  And lo and behold I came across Microsoft Expression Web 4.0 and its FREE!  I read this article “Why I love this free alternative to dreamweaver” and was sold (not exactly sold since its free).  After installing it, I am thrilled.  Looks quite similar to Dreamweaver and should be easy to get acquainted with.  Not sure how it will work with dreamweaver templates, but I will just have to find out as time goes by.  I also noted another free web design software OpenElement which looks to be a steeper learning curve, but if MSFT Expressions doesn’t work out, I will check it.

I do love Lightroom that I have on Creative Cloud but its somewhat reasonably priced at $9.99/mo and includes Photoshop, and its always the latest version.  It’s most likely going to turn out to be a bait and switch routine whereby at the end of this year (2014) they will raise the rate after getting customers addicted to their product.  Bastards!  I guess I will find out soon enough.  But the whole concept of Adobe moving to renting their software instead of out right selling it really sucks.  I’ve heard from many other web developers that are simply going to other available options that are way cheaper or even free.  I also feel a corporation should stand by their products even if they are older models/versions.  Imagine if you brought in your 2007 Chevy to a dealer and he said they no longer service them, you have to buy a new one, oh wait.. you have to RENT a new one.  Big mistake Adobe, I hope you suffer in sales because of this.