CS3 Crash before opening & Printer issues

Question

MacBook Pro Using Tiger, Problems with Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop CS3 and HP Photosmart C4280 Printer/Scanner
The problem started last week. I went to open the HP Scan Pro application to scan a document. The program started to open but an error came up before it loaded saying, "The application HP Scan Pro quit unexpectedly..." but if I start the program after unplugging the printers USB cord from my computer an error says "Error- Sorry, scanner could not be initialized. (Scanner not found.)" Therefore the error and crash only occur when the printer is connected. When I try to scan from the printer itself the printer screen says, "USB not connected". I also cannot print, the error message that comes up says "Print- Error when printing". If these were the only problems, I would blame it on HP and would be asking the question in their discussion boards, but the problem extends into CS3 as well. With InDesign, I open the program and the start up box comes up and acts like it is loading, but once that is finished nothing happens (the program itself just doesn't open). With Illustrator the same thing happens with the start up box but once it goes to load the program the same error message that happens with ScanPro comes up "The application Adobe Illustrator CS3 quit unexpectedly...". When opening Photoshop, an error box comes up that says "An Unexpected and unrecoverable problem has occured. Photoshop will now exit". Safari also seems to be freezing more often, I have had to "force quit" at least once an hour.
Last week when I had the problem I uninstalled the HP software and reinstalled and it seemed to fix the problem, until it started again today. Last week the CS3 problem was only happening in Illustrator and InDesign, but Photoshop was working and it seemed to fix itself before I did the reinstall if I remember correctly (but I'm not positive about the order in which issues were resolved last time). I went to do the same thing this time, but in the HP uninstall program it wont let me finish because the "uninstall" button wont work.
Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

I am having the same issue with my Mac. We have a hp 5550 printer and cs4 on a Mac G5 2.3 ghz processor power pc, 8gb ram and 500gb hard drive space. It started with the Adobe products. You could not open any of the programs. It seemed like some of the programs wanted to start and then all of a sudden the application would quit. We called Adobe support and they told us to uninstall. We can't uninstall all of a sudden even from the disk. We were told to uninstall by throwing the CS4 app folder in the trash and then use the Clean Utility app to delete the remaining files. That didn't work. Now the printer doesn't work and we can't install adobe acrobat from the web. We get this error, "Adobe reader could not install. Adobe reader was not able to install necessary component and must quit." When we tried to uninstall through adobe utilites, run the clean utility, and reinstall CS4, the computer asks us for the password and we enter it and then the install quits. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!! Thanks!
Lindsay