Acrobat Pro 8.1.2 won't create PDFs by itself or within an Office 2007 application. Please help.

Question

Well, needless to say, everything was working fine when our department was running Acrobat 7 and Office 2003. We made the choice a few weeks ago to upgrade to Office 2007 and Acrobat 8. Both are pushed via Group Policy. One other thing to note, as I think it might be an issue, is that our users have their My Documents redirected to a server. I only mention this, because the Default PDF Output Folder within Acrobat 8 is My Documents.
Here are the strange things that we've noticed so far:
1) When you open up the Adobe PDF Properties within Printers and Faxes, the Location displays an "x" followed by two non-standard box characters that I can't seem to write out here. I've uploaded a screen shot if that makes it easier. On a manually installed copy of Acrobat 8, this location box will say My Documents.
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g223/daedalus42/adobe_weird_characters.png
2) The Adobe PDF printer port grabs LPT1, even if there is another printer already on that port. This behavior is seen when being pushed via GPO. When it's manually installed via the disc, Adobe PDF gets it's own special port "My Documents\*.pdf" with a description of "Adobe PDF Port". When I try to see if I can add such a port on the GPO pushed computers, it doesn't list it as an option. Here again are two screen shots to show what I'm talking about.
Weird Port:
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g223/daedalus42/adobe_weird_port.png
Adobe Port:
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g223/daedalus42/adobe_correct_port.png
Ok, so those are just the oddities seen after performing a GPO installation.
3) When I right click on a Word 2007 (*.docx) file and choose "Convert to Adobe PDF", it asks me where I want to save the newly created PDF at. It will start converting it, but a few seconds later a balloon error pops up saying that the document failed to print.
4) When I try to create a PDF via the Word 2007 ribbon add-on for Acrobat, I get the same error.
I decided to bump a standard user up to administrator of the local machine. All these errors go away and they can create PDFs to their heart's content. As soon as I bump them back down to a standard user, new errors arise.
5) Now when they try to create a PDF, they get prompted TWICE for the PDF Save As location. When I click on Convert to PDF via the context menu of the Word 2007 file, I get the Adobe PDF Status box, then a few seconds later, I get the Save Adobe PDF File As box. I tell it where to save the PDF to. I then get a second box asking me where to save the PDF to, but it's titled different. This new box is "Save PDF File As". Whatever location I choose there, I get an Access Denied error and an Adobe Printer error that the document has failed to print. I've created screen shots of those as well. Here they are in order:
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g223/daedalus42/adobe_access_denied_01.png
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g223/daedalus42/adobe_access_denied_02.png
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g223/daedalus42/adobe_access_denied_03.png
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g223/daedalus42/adobe_access_denied_04.png
Does anyone have any solutions whatsoever to fix this? I'm not about to go around to 100 computers and install Acrobat manually when it should work correctly via GPO. If Acrobat doesn't like the fact that a user My Documents is redirected to the server, I noticed that I can change the default PDF file location within the Adobe Customization Wizard. I've not tested that yet to see if it would even help.
I should mention that I have tried running a repair. Didn't help. Uninstalling and reinstalling via GPO. Didn't help. So, we've installed the Microsoft Office PDF Creator plug-in and that works perfectly. For the time being Acrobat Pro has basically dropped itself down to a reader for all intents and purposes.

Answer 1

@ Bill@VT: I did try adding a port. That's the problem. When it's on a problematic installation, those special Adobe Port aren't available for me to choose from.
OK, I have some new information regarding my issue. I've done some more testing and this is what I have learned and how I arrived at that conclusion.
b It appears to be an issue with the 8.1.2 update.
1) I manually installed Acrobat 8.0.0 via the executable file I downloaded from Adobe Licensing. I had to go through all the installation prompts, enter the serial key, accept the EULA, etc. I even applied the 8.1.0 update. At this point, everything was fine. Any user on this computer could create PDFs via any method. The Adobe PDF Port was correct and no listed under LPT1 like in the above screen shots. And My Documents was listed as the Default PDF Location, even though users have their My Docs redirected to the server. Like I said, everything worked perfectly.
2) I decided to install via the Administrative Install Point (AIP) on the server for Acrobat 8.1.2 and the corresponding transform file. After doing this, the problems came back. My first assumption is that the transform file is causing the problem.
3) To verify that it was in fact the transform file I perform an install from the AIP using the AcroPro.msi file only. No switches and no transform file. Guess what? Problems are still there. So, that wipes out the transform file problem.
A couple of notes:
It could be related to the AIP and doing administrative installation upgrades to 8.1.2. My next test is to install 8.0.0 from scratch and manually upgrade that installation to 8.1.0, then 8.1.1, then 8.1.2 to find out when and if it breaks.
I was able to get a contact number for Adobe's "Volume Licensing" department, so I might end up giving them a call. In fact, even if I narrow down what appears to be the problem, I'm still going to have to give them a call to find out what can be done about it. Because at the moment, the issue is there for 100+ users and something needs to be fixed. All I'm doing at this point is working backwards to figure out what may have caused the problem in the first place.