Investigating a problem that's beyond the readily available technical support.

Question

I've been having a problem with LR 4.4, apparently with a corrupt catalog, about which I've spoken at length with Technical Support in India several times, with discouraging results.  The first three calls were with first-level support people; it became abundantly clear that the knowledge of these people is very limited: they couldn't even comprehend the nature of the problem.  I then spoke this Friday evening for about three hours with a supervisor, a very pleasant man who clearly had a quite sophisticated knowledge of the workings of LR4 and tried very hard (and long) to help me resolve the problem.  After three hours of meeting with continued frustration, he suggested he'd bring up the issue with colleagues at a Technical Support meeting they're having this coming Monday and then call me back.  In the meantime, when I tried to start up LR to explore the problem further on my own, I found that it wouldn't launch.  I've been through some of the more thoughtful discussions about this issue on this site, but none I've seen so far looks promising.
At this point, there seems to be no recourse with Adobe, beyond calling the Technical Support number that connects me with the facility in India.  Does anyone know of any other approach?
Thanks for your attention.

Answer 1

I'll give it a try, but it's best done with a screen-shot, which I now can't make because I after my last telephone support session, I can't launch LR.
My catalog is corrupt.  That was revealed by the support supervisor during the recent three-hour marathon session in which I gave him control of my computer.  He elicited a corrupt-catalog error message, but unfortunately I don't know how and I don't have a copy.
I'm running  LR 4.4 under Windows 7 (updated) on a Dell Optiplex 760. My image files  are arranged chronologically under C:/Users/MyName/My Pictures in folders by year, one folder per year. Within each year there are sub-folders containing the image files (mostly Nikon raw), one for each date on which the images were captured. (For example,  C:/Users/MyName/My Pictures/2013/2013-04-24.)  (My image files occupy about 400 GB of disk space and are backed up, as are my Lightroom data.)
The main superficial symptom of the problem is the following: For the most part, the arrangement of folders in LR (as seen in the left panel in the Library module) has exactly the same struture (e.g., My Pictures/2013/2013-04-24), except for the year 2013.  That year's folder contains many but not all of the by-date folders that are on the hard disk.  However, I have imported those files.  They appear under a second top-level folder in LR, the exact name of which, I can't recall for sure.  Those folders cannot be moved into the proper tree because the folders already exist there.  Now, when I try to import new recently captured images, they appear by date-of-capture under the second top-level folder, not the the "proper" one.
One could argue, "Why not just go along this way since what really counts is organizing your images by collection sets, collections, keywords, etc.?"  While I sympathize with this suggestion, I have two problems with it.  1) I rely quite a bit on a well-organized folder structure and 2) the problem reflects a corrupt catalog (with other unknown consequences down the road).
I'm hoping that the support supervisor will have a solution on Monday, but I'm not confident.  Furthermore, what little confidence I at the end of the support session was further eroded by finding that I couldn't launch LR.  I realize I could try re-installing LR, but the problem is messy enough as it is.
It's possible that I created this problem myself somewhere along the way during a recent version upgrade (and catalog upgrade) and subsequent manipulations, but regardless of the cause, I need to have it fixed.  Unfortunately, trying to deal with Adobe support is like dealing with a brick wall.
Thanks for your attention.