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It is not very often that a software company gets right up my nose. I do not mean a minor annoyance, I mean a full-scale kick in the teeth sort of annoyance. But Adobe has managed it this week.

Now, Adobe is a company I usually have a lot of time for. Photoshop was brilliant, even if it is looking like a somewhat stuffed pig these days. PageMaker was a good acquisition from Aldus, but InDesign took it to a new level and really shook up the publishing industry.

And now Adobe has launched CS2, its new wave of products all designed to make us reach into our pockets and pay the upgrade tax once more. In truth, I can do all the image twiddling I need in an ancient and long-ago licensed copy of Paint Shop Pro 5, but Photoshop CS did tempt me to open the wallet. I do a lot of digital photography, both with the Nikon D1X (6-megapixel) and the new Kodak SLRn (14-megapixel), and now with the gorgeous Epson RD-1 too. And CS brought some really useful functionality to the party.

So with the release of CS2, I was tempted to upgrade. Except that the UK price for the upgrade to the suite is £419 and the US price is $549, which at today's exchange rate is £290. I asked Adobe's PR people why Adobe thought it could charge some £130 more in the UK than in the US. The answer was fabulous:

'Adobe products, such as Photoshop CS and InDesign CS - as well as competitive products in our markets - have remained at comparable rates in euros to former versions. The issue is that the GBP currency is at a historic high vis-à-vis the

I hope you are reassured by that. It does not matter that the dollar-to-pound ratio has been between 1.86:1 and 1.93:1 for the last three months, according to the chart on the BBC Business website. It is just too much like hard work for Adobe to set a price that accurately reflects the real exchange rate. So I hope we are all glad that Adobe has set the price high, just to be sure we can be ripped off in comfort.

Resigned to having my wallet unscrupulously emptied, I went to the Adobe.com online shop to order the upgrade. I found myself in the USA Adobe Store, despite having logged in with my Adobe ID, which gives a history of everything I have purchased before from Adobe UK.

Obviously, Adobe will not let me buy my upgrade in dollars and have it delivered to my UK address - how would it cope without its £130 UK Special Tax?

Feeling a bit of a twit, I moved over to the UK part of the store and tried to make my purchase there. Except I couldn't log in using my Adobe ID that had just worked on the US site. Strange, I thought, so I went back to the US site and the login worked fine. Back to the UK shop, and it failed. So I pressed the 'Forgot your Adobe ID?' button and the website emailed me my ID and password, which were, of course, identical to the ones I was trying to enter into the UK shop. It seemed the UK shop was broken, so I filed a bug report on the website to the web support team, and decided to wait until this was fixed before attempting to buy the upgrade.