Illustrator CC crashes: 13 times this morning & counting ...

Question

Illustrator CC crashes constantly. I have a 27" iMac running OSX 10.8.5 with 12GB RAM. Illustrator ran beautifully up until about a week ago. Now it's a mess.
Crashes seem to have unrelated causes. Just recently it has been crashing on start up, but before, it was crashing when I tried saving files, fiddling with keyboard shortcuts, or doing nothing in particular.
I have tried the following:
- removed the preferences file
- removed the un_US folder,
- installed the Java for Mac OS X 2013-002 update
- restarted the machine
- ran "cleanup" (didn't work)
- uninstalled and reinstalled Illustrator CC
- changed permissions on folder "Adobe Ilustrator CC" to Read & Write for all
- repaired permissions on hard drive
- installed latest driver on Wacom tablet
- installed Verdana & Tahoma fonts on my machine (not sure why they were missing)
- read all forum answers back to the beginning of time (measuring in CC years, of course), which is where I got all these ideas.
Keep 'em coming, I'll try anything.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Dubuque,
- ran "cleanup" (didn't work)
- uninstalled and reinstalled Illustrator CC
Did you run the Cleaner Tool between uninstalling and reinstalling?
You have probably seen this list during your search, but just to make sure (sorry).
You may try the following (you may have tried/done some of them already) and see whether it helps (the following is a general list of things you may try when the issue is not in a specific file; 3) and 4) are specifically aimed at possibly corrupt preferences):
1) Close down Illy and open again;
2) Restart the computer (you may do that up to 3 times);
3) Close down Illy and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift/Cmd+Option+Shift during startup (easy but irreversible);
4) Move the folder with Illy closed (more tedious but also more thorough and reversible);
5) Look through and try out the relevant among the Other options (Item 7) is a list of usual suspects among other applications that may disturb and confuse Illy);
Even more seriously, you may:
6) Uninstall, run the Cleaner Tool, and reinstall.
http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/cscleanertool.html