You answered yourself before I got here, but... http://windowssecrets.com/newsletter/using-windows-7s-xp-mode-step-by- step/

Given that I've found Photoshop 6.0 works okay on Windows 7 without using XP Mode (but with UAC turned off), I wonder if 5.5 would...  Somewhere around here I have an old copy of that; maybe one day I'll try it.

-Noel

UAC is Windows User Account Control, which is a big reason why older software might end up being incompatible with the latest OS. 

Basically, in the "bad old" days, every application acted like it owned your entire computer, and modified anything and everything it saw fit.  Nowadays, by contrast, applications are supposed to install in certain places, then only make modifications and store data in user-specific places.

UAC is the Windows feature that asks you, during installs, whether you really want to allow an installer to make changes to the system, and it causes the redirection of some things that used to be at the system level to be stored in other, user-specific places.  It also causes your applications to be run without privileges, even though you may have added yourself as an Administrator.

UAC's folder redirection seems akin to "magic" and I've always felt it was a real hack job.

But in general UAC does protect people who don't really understand how everything works in Windows from a lot of malware, and - though Microsoft provides the ability to adjust the settings to facilitate greater compatibility with ancient apps - advising people to disable it has to be given with a disclaimer:

You should search for Windows User Account Control or just Windows UAC in Windows Help and online to learn what it does for you before choosing to disable it.

If you DO end up wanting to try disabling it to see if Adobe's old version will install, just click Start, type UAC in the search box, and click on Change User Account Control Settings when it comes up.  You'll need to reboot after the change.

Edit:  This seems out of order because it is; I had neglected to hit the Submit button.

-Noel

I believe that the problem is probably the installer for photoshop 5 LE is not compatible with newer windows systems (vista and windows 7).

You'll be much happier with pse 10 anyway which is compatible with windows 7 and has more features than the LE version of photoshop.

For example if you have or plan to get a digital camera that shoots in the camera raw format, LE won't be able to even open those files and another big difference is the transform controls.

LE only has a couple of ways to transform like scale, but no perspective or distort which pse 10 does have.

The best thing to do is download the trial of pse 10 which is fully functional for 30 days and see if it meets your needs and you can often find pse 10 locally for better price than adobe offers.

Hi,

you can copy across an old XP installation.

On an XP machine copy the Photoshop 5.0 LE program folder from C:\Program\Adobe onto a USB stick. Then also copy the all the DLLs from C:\Windows (there are usually 6 or so), and also copy pcdlib32.dll from C:\Windows\system32.

On the Windows 7 machine copy the Photoshop 5.0 LE folder from the USB stick across to C;\Program Files and also drop all the DLLs into the Photoshop folder.

On the Windows 7 machine in the Photoshop folder right click on photosle.exe and choose Properties - Compatibility tab and then choose "Run this program in compatibility mode for Windows XP (service pack 3).

John