Illustrator CS6 not printing all of a sudden

Question

Hello,
It's been a while since I needed to print something using Illustrator on my home computer, but just now when I tried, it gave me a lot of problems. Firstly, it checked "Print to File" by default. When I went to uncheck that option and hit okay, bringing that window back up showed the Print to File checkbox still checked -- so it's like it never saved that I unchecked it. When I go to print right after I unchecked Print to File, it shows a loading box (like when Illustrator is performing an intensive action), which goes to 7% and then stops and never continues.
I can see how perhaps it would do that for an enormous document with lots of stuff going on, but this document is a regular default preset 8.5"x11" CMYK 300dpi sheet with a few vector shapes, a pattern background, and some text. I also just as a test, tested a new document with a simple squiggly line path and nothing else, and it did the exact same thing.
I tested some other programs in the Adobe suite as well. InDesign has the same problem. However, both Photoshop and Fireworks prints fine. Photoshop I even tested with only vector shapes to see if perhaps it was vector vs raster that was the problem, and it still printed fine.
I noticed that Illustrator is defaulting to a print preset called 'Custom' instead of the normal '[Default]' that I'm used to seeing. Setting it to [Default] does nothing to help the issue, but either way I was also wondering how to reset my print presets, if anyone knows.
For reference, this is on a Windows 7 64-bit PC with 4GB DDR2 and 300GB free HDD space. I know for a fact that this same hardware setup and windows installation has printed Illustrator documents just fine before.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Noted about the pastebin. If I could edit the orginal post, I would - I don't see an option to do so though?
Anyway, updates applied. Crash still occuring.
For full disclosure, the crash is only happenning currently on a specific file. Sadly, that specific file is the project that I am currently working on. If this is an isolated case, then I can live with it, but the problem is that I've now lost all of my work from yesterday and I'm worried that I'll end up losing all of my work again on the next version of the file.
This is the first time that Illustrator has started acting up and it appears to be out of the blue - no other app installs or fonts or plugin's etc. I have had some random photoshop crashes as well as of late, log is below for that if that helps.
Here's the pastebin link for the most recent AI crash log after the updates you asked me to apply: http://pastebin.com/8sPBLNA9
Here is the pastebin link for a recent Photoshop crash log: http://pastebin.com/XrvhfEzm