If you support an art department as part of your job, chances are the Adobe Creative Suite is all they really care about. The OS could go without updates, Office could go without security patches, and you could go on vacation without them noticing as long as Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat all worked properly. Which is why it’s so upsetting when a CS4 installation that’s worked for months suddenly gives this error instead:

Licensing for this product has stopped working.
You cannot use the product at this time.

There’s a variety of reasons that the CS4 licensing components might give up the ghost, including low system resources, a damaged licensing sub-system, or corruption of the licensing data itself. The message goes on to suggest reinstalling the component in question, but it’s a solution that seldom, if ever, succeeds. Instead, find the error code that the bottom of the window, and take a look at this handy, exhaustive, and embarrassing entry in Adobe’s own Knowledge Base: Error “Licensing for this product has stopped working” when you launch Adobe Creative Suite 4 products.

In that article (far too lengthy to even summarize), Adobe helpfully explains the nine different ways your legally purchased and properly installed Creative Suite products might have licensing failures, and the variety of ways it can be addressed on a machine-by-machine basis. One of these procedures will undoubtedly fix your individual CS4 installation, if not the much larger issue that even corporate editions of Adobe’s flagship product can be hobbled by an overly zealous, overly complicated DRM system.

Special Thanks: My intrepid colleague Jasson Lewellen discovered many of these issues firsthand, as well as a number of their solutions, and pointed me at Adobe’s Knowledge Base documentation of them for this article.