Illustrator bug- menu bar all messed up, and it keeps crashing

Question

I have the weirdest bug on my trial version- the menu bar on top appears with $$$ signs and all messed up, and crashes constantly. I tried to delete and reinstall illustrator (I downloaded a trial version of the basic creative suite with Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, but had the bug only on Illustrator. I even reinstalled Leopard (and in the first installation it was a brand new iMac), which also did not help, so I have no idea what to do. Has anyone else had the problem or knows what to do?
Thanks!
Dotan

Answer 1

i had continual illustrator cs4 freezes in relation to the menus and some file types as well. (win 7 prof 64 bit)
But I found it it worked in a newly created user profile fine.
After having shelled out 3500.- eur for the masters colletion, I was rather dissapointed to find that i have to dig into my pocket for support when the software breaks. The solution is pretty simple assumabley known and could have been answered in two lines of text instead of the useless prefab answers i got.
But first I have to join the general gripe about the stability of illustrator and flash in paticular. It is obvious that each product is created by different teams who do not share common standards. Inexplicable.
Quark never cared about their customers while they were market leader either, remember that, Adobe?
Their frustration became your success. It might pay to remember that part of your history.
I solved the problem by replacing the entire settings folder with the one from the functional profile
C:\Users\user-name\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS4 Settings
save any custom color sets, etc first.
three days of hair pulling for a 12 second solution.
Thanks, Adobe!
My motivation to pay another 1200.- for an upgrade is somehow shrinking very, very quickly.