Error "You entered an invalid serial number..." when you enter Adobe Creative Suite 3 serial number after starting Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

When you start Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional after installing Adobe Creative Suite 3, you are prompted for a serial number. When entering the serial number for your copy of Creative Suite 3, you receive the following error message: "You entered an invalid serial number. Please correct it in order to proceed".

Some files relating to the serialization of Acrobat have been damaged or removed. This is a known side effect of running the Adobe CS3Clean Script available at www.adobe.com/support/contact/cs3clean.html using clean-up level 1. This damage affects both users who installed Acrobat separately, and those who installed Acrobat as part of Creative Suite3.

Do one of the following solutions:

If you bought Acrobat 8 Professional separately from the Creative Suite, enter the serial number which came with this version of the product, rather than the serial number you received with Creative Suite 3.

If you installed Acrobat 8 Professional as part of the Creative Suite and either ran Adobe CS3Clean Script or the serialization of your Creative Suite installation has been damaged or removed, do the following:

• On Mac OS X: Run the removal tool for Acrobat (called "Acrobat Uninstaller", normally located in /Applications/Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional) and then reinstall Creative Suite using the instructions below on "Reinstalling/Repairing Creative Suite 3".
  
  
  
  Note: If you cannot locate the Acrobat Uninstaller tool in the Acrobat folder, follow the instructions in solution 3.

• On Windows: Run the Acrobat Uninstaller before repairing/reinstalling the Creative Suite 3 installation using the instructions below on "Reinstalling/Repairing Creative Suite 3".

If you cannot locate Adobe Acrobat 8 in the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel (Windows) or the cannot locate the Acrobat Uninstaller in the Acrobat Application folder (Mac OS), run the Adobe CS3Clean Script, selecting clean-up level 2 and then reinstall Creative Suite 3.

Double-click the Add or Remove Adobe Creative Suite 3 [Product Version] file located in /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers and select the option to reinstall Creative Suite 3. If this file is not available, double-click the Adobe Creative Suite 3 [Product Version] installer on the original media from which you installed Creative Suite 3 and follow the on-screen instructions to reinstall Creative Suite 3.

To repair your installation of Creative Suite 3:

If there is no entry for Creative Suite 3 in the control panel, then double-click the Install CS3 [Product Version] application on the original media from which you installed Creative Suite 3 and follow the on-screen instructions to reinstall Creative Suite 3.

Whenever Acrobat is invoked and finds that its cached serial number has been erased, it requires entry of that serial number. In the case of an installation of Acrobat that was installed separately (using an Acrobat serial number), you can simply re-enter that serial number when prompted. However, you cannot do this with your Creative Suite serial number, because the Acrobat serial number entry facility does not recognize Creative Suite serial numbers. The Creative Suite installer will correctly reset the Acrobat cached serial number when it repairs an Acrobat installation, but it will not do this repair if it detects that Acrobat is already installed. This is why Creative Suite users must first uninstall Acrobat from their system (or remove it using the cleaner script at level 2) before repairing.