I just installed Adobe’s Creative Suite 5.5 as an upgrade (from CS5) on a couple of machines here at work.  It’s a long process (about an hour each machine) but I got through it without any troubles.

As is so often the case, I knew there would be updates available.  So I set about seeking out the updater Adobe uses.  Now that used to be handled by Version Cue (deprecated) and this thing called Updater6 or some such (deceased).  What’s managing the updates for Adobe products today?

In the past you didn’t want to run the Help —> Updates because that would run updates for just the application from whose help menu you made that request.  Back in those ancient days, though, every application had its own update option.

Not so today.  Thinking this might be a good place to begin… no, that’s not right.

First I slogged through the shortcuts in the Windows Start menu searching for anything update like.  Since the folders for 5 and 5.5 were present I went through both of them.  They are very clean and streamlined; however, there is no mention of updates anywhere among the shortcuts there contained.

Next I trudged through the various Adobe folders.  It’s a 64 bit machine so there are folders under both Program Files and Program Files (x86).  Tried all the Adobe folders and those Adobe folders under Common Files (in both locations) and found nothing useful.

Talking with a friend he mentioned that Photoshop had an Update link.  So I opened Ps and went to Help —> Updates.  This launched something called Adobe Application Manager.  Back into x86 Common Files I found a folder called AdobeApplicationManager (note the lack of spaces and thus it’s out of the expected alphabetical order).

You might guess that within that folder I would locate the executable for running this update application.  Haha!  Sucka!

There is an executable in there.  It’s called Set-up.exe.  This little gem fails upon execution thusly:

So it goes.  Who needs updates anyway?

The short answer to the problem is to open Photoshop (or one of the other applications which happens to have an update link under its help menu) and use Help —> Updates to run the Adobe Application Manager.  Remember: not all applications in the Suite have such a link.

Good luck with that.

Of course if you find a way to run this application directly or where it is located feel free to share.