Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Adobe bug: apps terminated after 2 minutes

I spent several hours today trying to resolve the following problem: after several minutes from start, any program from Adobe Master Collection 5.5 (Photoshop CS5.1, Illustrator, Premier) will show message box with following text (MSVCR90.dll was mentioned in caption):

Runtime Error. This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it it an unusual way.

Google or Adobe Support Forums were not helpful at all, but finally I found answer at one russian forum (forum.ru-board.com, author: romby): disabled AdobeAAMUpdater in windows scheduled tasks.
Indeed, several days ago while performing background processes cleanup, I disabled that AdobeAAMUpdater-1.0-%computername%-%username% task since I don't need automatic every day checking for Adobe products updates at this particular computer. I never started any of Adobe products until today, and since some time passed I never suspected my action as reason for that problem. Re-enabling scheduled task fixed the problem, and scheduling it for the first run on 01.01.2050 did no harm and caused no failures.

While googling  for solution I found a lot of questions regarding similar message boxes (even for much older releases), but I'm not sure if they have the same reason. Anyway, I can't understand how and which Scheduled Task checking code path can lead to such catastrophic program failure (awful job, Adobe), so I just hope that post will be helpful for some of you, folks.

2 comments:

  1. It sounds like it's one piece of an anti-piracy measure. Maybe I'm giving Adobe too much credit here.. ;)

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  2. It might be, but I really doubt it is.
    First changing schedule (instead of disabling a task) won't cause that error, second it actually looks like application updates checker (and nothing more).

    Whatever. I just hate all this bloatware crap, AdobeUpdater, GoogleUpdater (SEVERAL instances), jusched, etc. Each application (even from same company - omg google) wants to install additional all-time-running process, with all of them together using several seconds during startup, tenths of MBs of RAM (yes, I care even with 8 gb of ram in my laptop), and who knows how many CPU cycles/context switches (hello cpu caches).

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