Anyone else seeing these issues?

Question

Since upgrading to CS 5.5 several months ago about half of my company has been experiencing errors in InDesign specifically where files become corrupted for no reason, InDesign force closes, can't copy and paste in or out of InDesign, and a whole bunch of other issues. Below you'll find a list of issues currently experienced throughout my company. What is strange is that only about half of the users are experiencing these issues and no one experienced these issues prior to upgrading from CS3 to CS 5.5.
If anyone is having similar issues, knows the root cause of such issues, or has come up with a solution to any of these issues please let me know as we are currently perplexed as what to do next. Our IT department knows little to nothing about Creative Suite so they are of no help. As somewhat of a superuser i've been tasked with coming up with potential fixes to said issues.
Please let me know if you'd like any clarification or further explaination of errors and I'll try my best to provide what I know.
Known Issue #1: Cannot Print to PDF
Command/Steps: File – Print – Select Adobe PDF from Printer dropdown
Additional Info: file then freezes and has to force close. Sometimes results in corrupted file/no auto recovery of file
*Note: files are usually not packaged before exporting. Unknown if this has any effect.
Known Issue #2: Files Not Packaging Properly. When packaging a file, the fonts and links will package but when on the last step of saving a new version of the file to the packaged folder, InDesign freezes and then an error message pops up saying “InDesign has encountered a problem and needs to close.” It then force closes. When trying to re-open the file, the temporary file is still active and the file comes up corrupted. You can then not package or save the file, thus losing the file. InDesign does not auto-recover “clean” file but rather the corrupted file.
Command/Steps: File – Package – Copy Fonts, Copy Linked Graphics and Update Graphic Links In Package boxes checked before packaging.
Known Issue #3: InDesign suddenly freezing. An error message pops up saying “InDesign has encountered a problem and needs to close.” It then force closes. When trying to re-open the file, the temporary file is still active and the file sometimes comes up corrupted. You can then not package or save the file, thus losing the file. InDesign does not auto-recover “clean” file but rather the corrupted file. Other times, the file is recovered, however, it may have damaged links or images associated with that file.
Additional Info:
happens to files located both on and off the server
occurs on packaged and unpackaged files
occurs across multiple files (not just one file)
file sizes vary
Has occurred when trying to update or change fonts in the document (HMH)
Known Issue #4: Invalid images in files. When trying to print, save, or PDF, an error message pops up saying “InDesign has encountered an invalid .jpg. Please save the file with different formatting and relink in your document;” followed by the “InDesign has encountered a problem and needs to close” error. It then force closes. When trying to reopen and after updating, you then get an error message that says “Error encountered while reading jpeg image. Image may be damaged or incompatible. Resave with different settings and try again.” The file then becomes corrupted.
Additional Info:
Even after updating the file, sometimes it will still say an image is invalid
Known Issue #5: Unable to copy and/or paste in and out of InDesign to/from other documents
Command/Steps: Edit – copy or Edit – Paste (ctrl+c or ctrl+v)
Known Issue #6: Cannot export as one or more images are open in a background tasks
Command/Steps: File – export

Answer 1

We've had these issues occur in both 7 and XP. I believe those of us on 7 are running 64 bit but am waiting on confirmation from IT. What's weird is that we never had any issues like this with CS3, only after we upgraded to CS 5.5. Additionally, I was the first in the company to upgrade to CS 5.5 and didn't start experiencing these issues until the rest of the company upgraded. We had thought that upgrading everyone to Windows 7 would fix the problem but that has not been the case.
To my knowledge we don't run any third-party plugins with InDesign, we only run the factory install. I am not 100% sure if anyone has installed the 7.5.1 update as we don't have admin rights to our computers and aren't able to update things without permission from IT who isn't fond of installing updates.
As far as fonts are concerned, it had been suggested that the underlying issue to a few people's problems was that fonts were not installed correctly. I don't believe we have a font manager but we've purchased font packages and have installed them company-wide. Could the issue be due to CS being installed improperly? Or fonts being installed improperly?
We have McAfee antivirus but we were running that with CS 3 and had no issues.
I've been an InDesign user for the past 10 years and haven't seen consistent issues like this. Most of our users have been using the program for at least 3-5 years, some of us more than others so I'm inclined to say that it's not user error.