Even if you were able to talk directly to the manager, you'd have been stuck. (I talked to a woman who claimed to be "manager of customer care and sales in North America", and she didn't even know how to work their systems.)
There seems to be no support management team in any normal sense, and no upper-management concern about the lack of support management.
Here's 59 ways they failed to deliver me a working product:
To clarify, I never did speak to a "manager". That quite apparently simply is not allowed.
I did, finally and purely by chance, end up speaking with a front line support representative who not only came to understand what I was describing but who also demonstrated some initiative.
When they, after my lengthy -- starting "from the top", once again -- explanation, inevitably "went to their manager", they were given an incorrect response. I explained this, and how I had encountered it before, and what was actually needed. And this person actually went to the manager a second time and "pushed back" enough to get the manager to look again. Lo and behold, they found the right product in the licensing system (a special combo installer created for the CS 5.5 32-bit support) and finally supplied me with a working key for that installer.
Unfortunately, my intuition is that that front line representative was probably not long for that job.
P.S. Upon reflection, I now recall that I may have spoken to such a manager, once. Just long enough to get the brush off.
There seems to be no support management team in any normal sense, and no upper-management concern about the lack of support management.
Here's 59 ways they failed to deliver me a working product:
http://consumerist.com/2008/03/adobe-needs-eight-employees-t...