Fixing the Adobe CS3 problem: “The help system cannot be launched…”
February 8, 2008 – 1:07 amby Jake D
This article covers an error with Adobe CS3 (Mac). The two symptoms that I know of are
- “The help system cannot be launched because the help folder is missing. Please install the help folder or reinstall Dreamweaver” error message OR
- nothing happens when you launch help from one of the apps (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, etc)
I installed Adobe Web Premium CS3 on my computer, and in the applications folder were placed 7 or so icons all starting with “Adobe…” Most of these items weren’t even applications or aliases to such, they were just folders, so I had an extra mouse click (plus more searching) to launch one of these apps. So I created a folder called “Adobe” in my applications folder, stuck all of these adobe folders and files in there, and then made aliases for each of the applications and stuck those in the applications folder.
Each time I would launch one of these apps for the first time, I would get a message that said “Application has moved This application has been moved from the location in which it was originally installed. Some settings need to be repaired.” Each time I clicked Repair Now.
The apps seemed to work fine, until I tried to open Dreamweaver help, either from the help menu:
I would get this error: “The help system cannot be launched because the help folder is missing. Please install the help folder or reinstall Dreamweaver”. In Fireworks, I wouldn’t even get an error message, nothing would happen.
I tried launching from the .app instead of the alias (just to dummy check), and got the same error. I also searched for “help” within the Adobe file I made, and found a folder called help. This was buried way deep, so I didn’t want to mess with that if I could find another way.
To check, I remembered that there are .apps just for help in the adobe suite. The first thing that I noticed was that there are 2 of them: Adobe Help Viewer 1.0.app and Adobe Help Viewer 1.1.app. Openeing Help Viewer 1.0.app seemed to only have help for Adobe Viewer and Pro.
But Help Viewer1.1.app had the rest of the suite.
I also think I remembered that when you ask for help from one of the apps (Fireworks, Dreamweaver, etc) that it just opens the Help Viewer 1.1.app.
So if the application doesn’t know where it is, I thought about where a newly installed Adobe Application would think to find Help Viewer 1.1.app. If you notice in the screen shots of my applications folder, you can see that I happen to have a copy of Help Viewer 1.0.app in both my Applications folder and my Applications/Adobe folder.
So, the fix was to copy the Help Viewer 1.1.app in to the Applications folder. You don’t even have to restart your Dreamweaver.
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One Response to “Fixing the Adobe CS3 problem: “The help system cannot be launched…””
Worked for me. I didn’t’ try this myself as I was walking someone though it over the phone and they would not cooperate with me to test out the theory that an alias might work to do the same thing. If anyone else has the problem you might want to try an alias first so that you don’t end up with two different versions of adobe help 1.1 on the computer.
We had flash working for help but not the others.
Photoshop and contribute gave an error message as above and Fireworks did nothing.