For those interested:
Just spent quite a bit of time with Romsinha, and we managed to resolve the issue.
the problem seems to be the combination of:
- I have Adobe Photoshop installed in a non-default location
- My /Application is a separate hard drive, mounted onto /Application mount point
- Since Photoshop installer will not let me install the program into my /Application since it's a separate hard drive and the /Application level is root path, I had to install Photoshop into /Application/Adobe (folder created within /Applications to get it off the top directory level of the physical drive)
- The original Photoshop installer correctly identifies that /Application/Adobe is NOT root path and allows for installation
- ...BUT the Adobe updaters somehow misidentifies /Application/Adobe as root path and thus trigger a fatal error and aborts the update
The solution we found was to create a fully updated Photoshop installer (slipstream-like) and re-install Photoshop with all the updates fully implemented, into the /Applications/Adobe directory... so when the program is installed, no other update is needed.
Cumbersome, but that was the only fix. I think the Adobe programmers who created the updater root path check system for INSTALLDIR variable should look at what is going wrong. but otherwise, we found the workaround, so I'm happy!
if you have run into similar problems and other conventional fix mentioned earlier on this thread does not work, e-mail <removed email>for help...
Thanks Romsinha!