I have dealt with a very much less than ideal situation that took over 2 weeks to resolve. You have a Windows background or you work for Adobe? In any case, I'm going to recommend you for a Customer Support position, not!.
Follow up: Photoshop Elements 6 is now installed on my Mac. CS3 Clean program as suggested by Adobe's foreign tech support but was never intended for this purpose to remove this program or whatever the rogue script/package that was preventing installation. And it did not work. A friendly U.S. based tech support person had me go through and manually remove every Adobe folder and pref file, uninstalling every adobe product on my computer to get PS Elements installed. I sent a feature request into Adobe: making installing and uninstalling your programs straight forward.
Outlook: I'll be looking at the alternative graphic programs- acorn, gimp, pixelmator. I resent being dragged into Windows World on my Mac. The question is are any of them competitive?