I’m having trouble re-authorizing Adobe Digital Editions and now am unable to go back in to use it

I had Adobe Digital Editions in its earlier form, so I could read books during my thesis writing and obtaining my Master's degree.  I took a three-year break and am now wanting to use ADE again during my PhD work.  So, as I was checking out e-books from the university library, I had no trouble downloading them into my earlier version of ADE. I was then encouraged to update to 4.5.2, which I did with no issues, and was still reading my PhD library resources.  Until I tried to add another newly borrrowed university library book to the ADE library today, and it kept telling me there was an error, remaining unopenable. I started to look into the issue through the ADE help forum within the Adobe website and since I kept getting this error message, I was encouraged de-authorize my ADE and then re-authorize it, which I did and after multiple attempts, even deleting the application and re-downloading it, trying to change my password to no avail (can't even do that without a lot of trouble and being circled back around to the same web pages), and many hours wasted, I still cannot go into ADE.  I now have no access to my books for school, and have resorted to Kindle and PDFs.  Please advise as to how I can get ADE back to functioning normally again.