Programs not opening

I recently bought a new laptop, installed Acrobat Reader and two older versions of Photoshop and elements. These have all worked perfectly well until today when I tried to open a pdf attachment to an email. This failed. On checking I discovered that ALL my Adobe programs refused to open , including the ones that were already on the laptop. This included Adobe Help.

I've looked up various pieces of advice including unisntalling and re-installing the three programs mentioned

As they're are all affected, is it possible that some trigger mechanism has been switched off. I'm not particularly computer literate, so if anyone has any ideas how to cure the problem, straightforward instructions would be helpful.

If it helps, I'm using Windows 10.

Stuart