I'm cheesed off with the updater. I downloaded this to update InDesign 5.0.3 to 5.0.4 and ran the updater application. After giving it my password, it just sat there with the spinning blue/white barber's pole icon, not saying what it was doing, and that's how it remained for hours and hours. I left it doing this overnight in case it was actually doing something useful. But after maybe 16 hours of just sitting there with the twirling pole icon, I just quit it. (Note that pressing the Cancel button didn't work; I had to quit it from the Dock menu.) At that point (on quit) it popped up a box saying that the update had been completed successfully, which I don't believe.
Now, InDesign identifies itself in the Finder and in its start-up banner as version 5.0.3, but once it's loaded and I open its Info window, it says it's version 5.0.4. So, what to believe? It's probably a partial installation of 5.0.4 with some components not updated, but it's impossible to tell because there's no log file, and there wasn't even any indication whatsoever of progress from the updater, or even any sign of what it was doing.
I suppose I should be grateful that my copy of InDesign does at least still work (a previous updater once rendered it incapable of launching), but this is far from impressive. In fact, I've had no end of trouble with the CS3 installers in general. When I first installed CS3 on my brand-new 2.8GHz Mac Pro a few months ago, it took literally days to get everything installed successfully, with many forced restarts of the system, because the Adobe installers were so hopeless and just got stuck at different stages (and indeed locked up my computer - hence the forced restarts); I had to try most of them several times before they worked. And that was on a brand-new, 'vanilla' Mac Pro with no other software installed that might have interfered with Adobe's installer. (Oddly enough, I had no problems at all with installing on my previous G5, which died and forced the purchase of the new Mac Pro.)
The software's great once it's installed and working, but I can't believe how much hassle I've had from Adobe's installers and updaters. They're an absolute nightmare, and who wants to risk their working installations being ruined by dodgy installer software? I remember having problems with Adobe installers before (e.g. with the original CS applications). Installers shouldn't be rocket science, and it's high time that Adobe made its installers much more robust and foolproof. There's thousands of pounds of software at stake, per user, in the Creative Suites, and it's mission-critical for the majority of its users. The last thing the customer needs is to have their system messed up by an unreliable updater application.