Users of Adobe Systems' digital publishing products, including Photoshop, InDesign, and Dreamweaver, will have to shell out for new versions of the software if they want to run them without glitches on Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, Adobe says.

According to a statement posted on Adobe's Web site, the company "does not plan to issue updates to current versions of those products for Windows Vista compatibility."

That means users will have to pay hundreds of dollars to upgrade their Adobe software if they want trouble-free performance on Windows Vista, which is now preinstalled in virtually all new PCs shipping in the United States. That's because the current versions of most of Adobe's major products won't work properly on the new operating system.

Adobe Photoshop CS2, for instance, requires users to register the software each time it's launched on a Windows Vista PC, even if it's already been registered. Dreamweaver 8, Adobe warns, will crash on some Vista computers when users browse for files. InDesign customers, meanwhile, may get a false error message indicating they do not have enough available disk space to run the product.

Adobe lists a number of other known Windows Vista compatibility problems for those and other products. Additionally, Adobe Acrobat 8 encounters errors when run atop the new Windows OS, but the company says it plans to issue a free patch in the first half of 2007 to resolve those issues.

The bottom line is that Adobe customers who are satisfied with the current versions of their software will have little choice but to pay for upgrades if they buy a new PC this year. Adobe says the newest versions of Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and several other products will ship this spring and will be fully compatible with Windows Vista.

Tensions between Adobe and Microsoft may be partly behind Adobe's less than warm embrace of Windows Vista, the consumer version of which launched in January. Adobe recently accused Microsoft of violating European Union trade laws, claiming that Microsoft's bundling of Vista and the XML Paper Specification document creation application -- a potential competitor to Acrobat -- is anticompetitive.

Adobe officials were not immediately available to comment.