InDesign CS3 program will not open - Win XP - after trying to open corrupt file.

Question

Help! the program Adobe InDesign will not open up anymore.
Here is the story and what I have tried. One week on the 16th my server crashed two of the three hard drives failed (RAID) I had the two replaced. Since then all seamed to be ok but few of files were missing and some that I tried to open would crash InDesign I assume that the files got corrupt from the HD's going bad. Server kept telling me to run CHKDSK utility. I ran it and and some of the files reappeared. Today, thinking that the Chkdsk utility had fixed the bad files I tried to open one of the files that caused InDesign to crash and it crashed again.
Now I cannot open InDesign at all when I try to launch InDesign within 3-4 seconds Adobe will crash!  Reboot and try again same thing.
I tried to delete the files in the Recovery folder thinking it was trying to open the corrupted file that it last tried to open. Same thing.
I moved the preference folder to the desk top thinking that it might have been causing the problem - no change.
I reinstalled InDesign over top of the existing program (did not uninstall first) rebooted and tried to launch - no change.
I tried system restore, None of my restore points that I have tried (auto restore points) will restore my system for what ever reason.
Please Help with any suggestions I need this fixed soon.

Answer 1

Installing CS3 was a pain, and the installer is very sensitive to conflict with just about everything under the sun, so you need to run it in a bare-bones boot (but not safe mode). I turn off ALL non essential programs and services using MSConfig when doing a CS3 install.
That said, yes, running the CS3 clean script will probably remove all things Adobe from the system. The Microsoft utility is much more benign than the description makes it sound -- it removes registry information for previous installations so there is no trace of them to confuse the OS. I'm not aware that it has removed anything other than what it was told to remove, but I've only had to use it once, I think.
You can try a simple uninstall/reinstall first (and you should be able to remove and reinstall just ID from the suite if you use the original disks). That will certainly be faster and less painful than the clean script, but may not work. Seems odd that a serrver crash should have corrupted a local installation, though, so you might want to take a close look at the machine for other problems, perhaps some sort of malware invasion.
Peter