Illustrator File Will Not Open - Error message "Object label badly formatted"

Question

I have been working on a large image file for one of my classes; it has many layers and custom swatches, no text. I work on Creative Cloud at home, CS6 at school, and I think I had my .ai file saved under legacy file format CS4 trying to be safe (because I was not sure of my school's version and I have had a lot of problems accessing my files at school because of the version differences). I have been working on it back and forth between computers for quite a while, and today--while I had the image on my computer recently--it says "Acrobat PDF File Format is having difficulties: Object label badly formatted" if I try to open it.
I have tried: updating Adobe Illustrator; creating a new AI document and "placing" the file into it; opening the file in Acrobat (the file opened, which was a step...but it only showed a tiny portion of the artwork and left the rest blank. Under the tools, however, it still showed the image had 15 layers (under the layer menu)--and it had them marked them as "visible"--but there wasn't anything I could do to actually view them; I tried copy/pasting into illustrator from Acrobat; opening in Acrobat and "saving as" a PDF (it said "The document could not be saved. There was a problem reading the document (111)"; and I just did a system restore hoping that could exorcise the demons--but no such luck so far.
Do you have any ideas? I would greatly appreciate any words of wisdom and support you might have...and chocolate.
Thanks for reading this.

Answer 1

We now understand the problem, and are testing a solution. Here's my current understanding of all the elements of this issue.
CAUSE: The problem occurs in an interaction between Illustrator CS4, Suitcase Fusion 2 v13.2, and having an Illustrator document with one or more text boxes, containing text, which is *completely* off the artboard—not even the bounding box is touching the artboard. *Additionally*, there must also be at least one text box, with text in it, which is *on* the artboard (even so much as having the bounding box partly on the artboard is sufficient, again). When these conditions are met, saving the document *may* (but does not always) cause the problem.
PROBLEM: Attempting to open an affected document in Illustrator CS4 fails, with an "object label badly formatted" error. The problem can occur with older illustrator documents opened in CS4, as well as native CS4 documents.
UNAFFECTED: Despite any speculation in this thread, this problem does not affect Photoshop, nor has it occurred with any version of Extensis Suitcase older than Suitcase Fusion 2 v13.2, which shipped about eight days ago.
SOLUTION: The problem should be resolved by a 13.2.1 dot release. Although things could be delayed if we find something unexpected in testing, we currently expect to have the fix available this week, probably tomorrow (Thursday).
DOCUMENT RECOVERY: Extensis can fix any Illustrator CS4 document which exhibits this problem. For now, contact Extensis tech support if you need help with recovering any such Illustrator document. Be prepared to send tech support the affected Illustrator file(s). You can use the online contact form at http://www.extensis.com/en/support/contact_prod_support.jsp, or call tech support at 1-503-274-7030.
Special thanks to the users whose suffering and detailed reports helped us figure this out!
Regards,
T
Thomas Phinney
Sr Product Manager, Font Solutions
Extensis, a division of Celartem, Inc.