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Adobe DreamWeaver CC 2014 Does Not Launch! How to Fix Preference Permissions

Installing and uninstalling Adobe DreamWeaver CC 2014 several times resulted in no luck getting the installed DreamWeaver Application to launch.

Symptom: double-click to launch results in a brief blink and then nothing (fractional second failure). No error message, never even gets near the startup scfeen.

All other Adobe apps including CC 2014 have been running just fine.

A tech support call to Adobe India was pretty much as expected, except one clue emerged: the app would launch if a new admin account were created and it was run in that account. Adobe then punted and had nothing to suggest except “call your IT department”. Which I did, since that is myself.

So I went hunting.

Root cause

Two Adobe folders were set to owner root and group wheel:

diglloydMP:Preferences lloyd$ pwd
/Users/lloyd/Library/Preferences diglloydMP:Preferences lloyd$ ls -ld Adobe "ExtendScript Toolkit" drwxrwxr-x+ 27 root wheel 918 Jan 22 2014 Adobe drwxrwxr-x+ 6 root wheel 204 Jan 31 2014 ExtendScript Toolkit

As can be seen permissions generally allowed world access but something must have been off on some subfolder such that DreamWeaver CC 2014 could not read or write some crucial file. Having just installed it, this is a little odd for an installer not to check its own folders. It’s also bad code (bug) to not report critical errors.

Why these folders had these permissions is unclear (I would never have done so). Perhaps a past Adobe installer bug. Such permissions can be quite nasty: owner root with executable bits set can compromise the entire system. But I did not investigate deeper; I just wanted to fix it.

To look for “nasties”, use this command (in bold); it might find a few things that are normally owned by root, but normal applications should generally never do so.

find . -uid root -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ld

Fixing owner/group/permissions

This fix is using Terminal (no other way to do it).

The # lines are comments; the rest are command line commands to run in Terminal. “lloyd” here is the account login name for the account in use.

# change to Preferences dir and see what permissions are there
cd ~/Library/Preferences
ls -ld Adobe "ExtendScript Toolkit"
# change owner to 'lloyd' and group to 'staff
sudo chown -R lloyd Adobe "ExtendScript Toolkit"
sudo chgrp -R staff Adobe "ExtendScript Toolkit"
# all permissions for owner, deny permissions to all others 
chmod -R 700 Adobe "ExtendScript Toolkit"

When done, permissions should look like this:

diglloydMP:Preferences lloyd$ ls -ld Adobe "ExtendScript Toolkit"
drwx------+ 29 lloyd  staff  986 Dec  1 12:08 Adobe
drwx------+  6 lloyd  staff  204 Jan 31  2014 ExtendScript Toolkit

So all is well, right?

Not exactly. DW CC 2014 runs, but the intervals between rainbow beachball hangs averages 2 minutes. It is the biggest piece of crap MPG has ever used, beating only DW 5.5 for the title: MPG has used DW 5.5 for years; it is rife with bugs but can generally be used for reasonable periods of time until it crashes.

When the “Continue Trial?” dialog pops up, the world “trial” certainly takes on an appropriate meaning.

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