My primary laptop computer committed Seppuku this week. After it threw up various mysterious and random errors when launching applications, shutting down, or starting up, I took it to the Apple Store. Fortunately, it was covered under AppleCare, and the replacement of its logic board and RAM solved the problem, returning me to some level of sanity.
After the computer was returned, I had to do some minor maintenance to bring it back to speed. Then I tried to launch InDesign CS4. Imagine my surprise to see this mysterious error message appear on my screen:
The first lesson when you see strange error messages is not to panic. These days, a Google search can often quickly bring good results, but in Adobe Creative Suite 4 products, you can do this using the revised Help system. In InDesign CS4, choose Help > InDesign Help. The default setting is to display Community Help. This gives you access to a variety of third party sources to find answers to your query, in addition to Adobe Help resources. Results include postings here on InDesignSecrets.com! (If you simply want InDesign Online Help, you can choose that, and you can also use the Set Help Preference option to choose what the default Help result will display.)
In the case of my error, Community Help definitely brought positive results:
The second result was an up-to-date entry from www.creativetechs.com which directly dealt with this issue:
We’ve seen sporadic cases of Photoshop, InDesign, or Acrobat that stop working at various design firms, with the dialog box show above…. If this happens to your, make note of the error code, and take a look at this handy, exhaustive entry in Adobe’s Knowledge Base: Adobe: ‘Licensing for this product has stopped working’.
Adobe’s very lengthy technote about this problem lists several possible error codes, and provides different solutions for each. When an error code contains a colon (like mine), refer to the first half of the error number as the error code. A common solution is to download a patch to the Adobe licensing system. In my case, this solved the problem.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on May 6, 2009
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