Mic Not Working... Audition CS5.5 crashes when I hit Record

Question

I'm doing simple recording of narratives for my animated videos.  Seems simple enough.  I have CS5 and Soundbooth on my Mac PowerBook Pro with Snow Leopard OS X and 4 Gigs of RAM.  My microphone is a Blue Snowball Mic with a USB plug. I do not have a special audio card.  All I have is CoreAudio.  I've previously recorded and edited multiple narrations in Soundbooth with no problem. 
My horror story started a couple weeks ago when Soundbooth stopped recognizing my Snowball Mic.  I tried everything I could think of and nothing worked. Then I realized that Adobe had stopped supporting Soundbooth and switched to a totally rewritten Audition in CS5.5.  Based on that nasty bit of info, I bit the bullet and spent the nearly $600 to upgrade my CS5 Master Collection to CS5.5. I uninstalled CS5 and installed CS5.5.  Now, the Snowball is recognized in both my Mac Preferences and in Audition Prefrences.  Unfortunately, when I tried to actually record, NOTHING HAPPENED... and then something did happen... Audition CRASHED.  Now, whether I try to use Snowball or just the built-in mic, as soon as I hit the record button, Audition crashes. I rebooted my Mac... and Audition continues to CRASH.
If I've suddenly developed another fatal glitch in my own personal self, I wouldn't be surprised.  Or is it the microphone and its USB connection?  Or some incompatibility with my Mac?  I've been working with After Effects CS5.5 and Illustrator CS5.5 with NO PROBLEMS, so I'm thinking the uninstall/install went ok.
Hoping to be embarrassed when told of my stupid mistake and the easy, inexpensive fix.
Best to All of You,
RoadQuill

Answer 1

Hmm, I tried re-sending and I received a rejection from your mail server insisting the address was invalid.  I'll paste my response below in case anyone else finds this thread and is experiencing the same issue:
I'm sorry you're having troubles with your audio devices.  I use a
Snowball myself for much of my testing, so I know we can get this working
for you.
My first question would be whether you updated OS X around the time you
noticed this problem begin.  There was an issue with a few releases of
10.6.x where Apple changed how they identify audio devices to
applications, and this could often cause confusion to apps that had a
record of the old Ids.  Please try the following steps:
1.  Open Finder and navigate to /Library/Preferences     (This is the
system Library folder, not the one in your Users folder)
2.  Rename "com.apple.audio.AggregageDevices.plist" to anything else (eg.
"com.apple.audio.AggregateDevices.BAK" )
3.  Launch Audition
If the OS update was indeed the problem, this should resolve the issue by
forcing OS X to update this property file and trigger Audition to use the
new device Ids.  It should not negatively impact your system otherwise as
OS X simply rebuilds the file and updates the timestamp.
If this doesn't help, let's get Audition "reset" and configured properly.
1. Launch Audition, but hold down the SHIFT key while it's loading.  (This
overrides Audition's preferences file and sets it back to its default
settings.)
2. Open Preferences > Audio Hardware... And set your Default Input: to the
Blue Snowball.
3. You'll likely want to leave your Default Output configured as-is, but
verify it is configured for your expected output.
4. Click OK and attempt to record.