[whitedog]

I don't know for sure, of course, but I suspect the heavy demand for the very large CS3 downloads from all those customers with broadband internet connections just swamped their servers. In that case, they should have done their maintenance before they started selling CS3 online. Adding to the burden on their systems, they chose to offer betas of the CS3 versions of Premier and After Effects at the same time; each of these is a 1GB download. Their servers probably just crashed under the load. It would no doubt take an entire server farm to handle the demand. Bad planning, it seems.
The installation and authentication problems could have been minimized if Adobe had offered warnings and instructions up front. As it is they are probably buried in the small print that no one ever reads. More bad planning. For what Adobe calls the biggest product launch in their history they are showing a remarkable lack of foresight.
I'm glad I have to wait a little while to get my grubby hands on CS3. I'll have the bad experiences of all you early adopters to learn from. Thanks for doing the spadework for me. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif

[mwheeler]

This stuff is just too expensive. Adobe needs to do something for us little guys.