I successfully installed and ran my legal, registered CS2 Production Premium on two different Win VISTA 64 machines, first on my  original desktop, then my current laptop, which is what I now use.

Each time,  CS2 installed OK. I had learned the "trick" was to stop the installation  after the last program, before the suite proceeded to do the final  steps. If I failed to stop prior to those final steps, the error message  about registration occurred. If I stopped prior to the conclusion of  the installation, then each program worked fine.

HOWEVER...  I recently downloaded and installed CS5 demo, then removed CS5. I had uninstalled CS2 in preparation (because of disk space and potential conflicts). I cleaned the registry, as I also did after uninstalling CS5.

When  I went to re-install CS2 (using the original legal disks), now the setup.exe program DOES NOTHING. It  whirs when clicked, as if it's launching, then sits idle, not performing any tasks.  I've let it "try" for hours, but no results.

I have: clicked on the file from Windows Explorer, I have opened a command line window and run e:\>Setup.exe, I have even copied the disk to the desktop and tried to run Setup.exe from there. There is never an error message. There is only no activity whatsoever from setup.exe.

During the  time of the last successful CS2 installation and the current attempt to  install, there have been several Vista updates installed on the  machine.

So, I have successfully run CS2 on Vista 64,  but not since removing the CS5 demo. My system is a multi-core AMD 64-bit processor running Windows Vista Home Premium Build 6002 with all Microsoft updates applied. (And yes, having not had any paying  job in almost three years, I cannot figure out a way to fund the  upgrade...and, of course, Adobe has cut off support of any kind for  CS2.)

Does anyone have experience and a solution?