Adobe DESTROYED my Mac Pro, someone help!!!!

Question

Hello, everyone. This is an epic post but it's an epic situation for me. Please read the whole thing and offer advice, I am petrified with fear right now! My early 2008 Mac Pro (8 core, 2.3 ghz, 4tb, 16gb ram, Quadro 5600 GPU, OS X 10.5.6) has acted like a God since I got her in February '08. Haven't had a single problem with it, -except- when running Adobe CS4, which opens a world of hurt.
Any time I use Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, Encore, or Media Encoder, I get little windows that say 'null pict handle with error of 0.' There is now way to make them leave. Even when the programs work (rarely), I get those windows. Media Encoder, however, has never worked since I upgraded to CS4. I have run the CS4 clean script several times. There isn't a single trace of CS3 left on my computer.
That's the history of my Mac Pro CS4 problem. Here's where I ended up:
This morning I decided to uninstall Master Collection, run the clean script, and reinstall CS4, even though I've done it five or six times already and knew it probably wouldn't make Media Encoder work or the Null Pict Handle windows go away. I guess I'm an optimist. But when I went to uninstall CS4, I was informed that an original copy of the uninstaller didn't exist, leaving me unable to get rid of the buggy software! Then, I noticed when I clicked on Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Fireworks, or Contribute, the icons turned to question marks, and they ceased to appear in my Applications folder.
So I called Adobe tech support. God help me.
The tech support guy, name of Kelly, seemed good natured enough. I really felt like he wanted to help. He had me hold shift down while signing in to my Mac Pro, and sign in as 'Root.' I have no idea what any of that means or does, but he said to trust him. Then I was told to delete anything with Adobe affiliation. Then I was told to reset disk permissions on my boot drive. Finally, he told me to reinstall CS4.
Halfway into the install, he said, and I quote, "Tim it sounds like everything's gonna work out fine for you, there haven't been any snags yet so you should be alright. I'm gonna let you go, just call if you have any problems."
I wasn't comfortable with him leaving the line until I was sure my computer had been safely worked on, but he insisted he had to help other customers. So like an idiot, I let him go.
CS4 finished installing. Everything seemed fine. I figured I'd restart the computer just to be safe, and do some After Effects work. I clicked restart and everything went along as expected at first. Computer shut down, turned back on, got the beautiful Mac chime, the Apple logo with the bars scrolling around it, and BAM---- screen goes black and my Mac Pro is off.
And now... that's all I get. I turn the computer on, get the chime, the Apple logo, and then she turns off. Holding shift down does nothing. Letting the computer cool off doesn't help, either. The people at Adobe won't take responsibility, but I didn't do a single thing they didn't tell me to. Add to that, there hasn't been ONE problem with this computer until I introduced it to CS4. No problems with Final Cut Studio 2, Shake, Logic, or Blender. Just Adobe.
If anyone has any advice, I will be forever grateful. I am terrified right now that my baby, my 13,000 dollar beast of a computer, is dead on account of Adobe Master Collection, a bunch of programs I've almost completely quit using in favor of FCP.
Thanks!
-Thankfully, I have most everything of importance backed up on my time capsule.-

Answer 1

A few things you can try:
1) I hope you've backed up everything!
2) Pop in your OS X install DVD, hold down 'd'. Do a hardware test and see if anything is wrong
3) As above, but let the machine run to the installation screen, then open 'Disk Utility' and repair the main drive.
4) I hope you've backed up...!
5) Re-install your OS. Zero out your main boot drive and re-install OS X, then, if everything is working, install CS4.
6) Did I mention a backup???
7) If you have a time machine backup you can restore from it to salvage anything you need.
I have CS4 running on my Mac Pro and it runs OK. Good Luck!
-Jacques
Message was edited by: Jacques Toerien