Photoshop CS3 - need to uninstall & reinstall but deactivation is grayed-out

Photoshop CS3 was living happily for quite a while on my system running Windows 7 32-bit, however, lately, upon closing, it freezes, requiring a cntrl-alt-del to force quit. It has the 10.0.1 patch, the latest. A repair re-install did not fix the problem, and I am not aware that I installed anything recently with which it should conflict. I have tried the various tips & tricks on the forums related to refreshing caches, etc., but to no avail. Something's broken that I hope to fix with a clean install. Buying the latest cloud version of Photoshop is not in the budget ... I just want to get back to where I was ...
I believe I need to do a complete uninstall of PS CS3, including manually deleting all registry entries related to CS3, Adobe, Photoshop, etc. + running cleaner utilities. While not too happy about that, I'm willing to try it. Here's the problem, I suspect that I will also need to deactivate first to prevent some issue with Adobe to later re-activate the fresh install ... the trouble is, part of what seems to be corrupted are the menu items relating to "deactivate", "activate", etc. ... they are grayed out, so I have no way to deactivate before I attempt a complete uninstall.
A few questions;
Is there a known issue and fix for a missing deactivation / activation menu options for PS CS3?
Is there a way to manually preserve the activation key and remove all the other possible corrupted files and registry entries so that I can do a clean install?
Is there another way to fix a corrupted install of PS CS3?
Thanks in advance for any ideas!

Yes, I had already googled and found all those 3rd party solutions before I posted my original question ... I'm not too comfortable with those, rather, I am looking for a "cleaner" solution directly from Adobe. By the way, I re-installed PS CS3 again, then ran the CC Cleaner tool BEFORE uninstalling ... it did function doing this, it removed PS CS3, but left other parts installed (Bridge CS3), I then re-installed PS CS3, but the result was no better than using the Windows uninstaller.
The more I get into this, the more I think I may need a fresh install of my Windows 7 and all applications ... problem is, I still can't deactivate Photoshop CS3 so as to re-install it on a fresh system build ... that is, unless the Adobe server would recognize my computer's motherboard s/n and Windows 7 key and allows automatic re-activation ... does their server go by number of current activations or does it remember particulars of each current activation so as to "refresh" the activation on a clean install to an old computer previously activated?
Is it just me, or is this too many hoops to jump through to fix what used to be a solid piece of software? Is there some recent Windows patch identified as conflicting with CS3 software?

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