Deactivate Photoshop Elements 8 - Editor not opening

Question

Hello,
I have previously installed Elements 8.0 in my PC, and everything was working well until I changed the partition in my Hard Disk.
Ever since PSE won't run. I run the Elements Organizer manually, and it works, but whenever I want to run the Editor it keeps telling me:
"could not open a scratch file because the file could not be found."
And, After clicking ok, another box pops up and says
"could not intialize photoshop because the file could not be found."
So there's one problem..I've tried deleting the preferences file (Adobe Photoshop Prefs.PSP) but still the same problem. The Organizer works but not the Editor.
But actually, what I want to do is do a clean installation of my OS (Windows XP), but first I need to deactivate the working copy of PSE, which I can only do from the Editor (which is not opening!). How can I deactivate it?? Is there any manual way to do it without necessarily having to open the Editor?
I am afraid that if I just format my Hard Drive and then reinstall everything, it wont accept my serial key. I have installed PSE in other machine, so I need this serial key to work in my machine.
Thank you very much!
Ricardo

Answer 1

So, finally I called to Adobe Support, and after trying (without any positive outcome) to solve the error I had so that I could access the PSE8 Editor; they told me that it was not possible to deactivate PSE8 through the phone, and that if I had any problem, I should call again to the License Support phone number.
I had previously installed PSE8 on other PC, so I was worried that I could not use the only activation I had left in my notebook. However, it turns out that after formatting my hard drive and re-installing Windows, I was able to reinstall PSE8, using the serial key I've got.
It would be nice what sort of information is sent to Adobe when "activating" the software (it should be some kind of "unique" information from our PCs), so that next time we should not worry that much about deactivating the SW before formatting or reinstalling the OS, as long as it's the same computer (and that "unique" informatio still applies).
Well, thanks anyway for trying to help.
Regards,
Ricardo