I found a solution for my problem that was very similar to what was described here. I am running windows 7 but I was getting the same error and such when one of our employees was trying to use adobe, but not the others using the same station.
It turns out that there was something that got ported over when we migrated her profile from XP that adobe didn't like.
The fix is:
Run "regedit" from the start bar
Navigate to;
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
And then find the "AppData" value. It should be something like "%USERPROFILE%\AppData"
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As soon as I changed the profile that was having the problem to that value, adobe started working fine.
Mine was "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data" which I assume is a throwback from the XP port.
Hope this helps.