Premiere Elements 8 won't do anything after opening - and after loading contents disk

Question

Similar to an earlier thread, ie: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3058854#3058854 I couldn't get Premiere Elements to work - but this was back in July and I hadn't found the forums at that point, getting baffling lost trying to find anything at all useful on the Adobe website.
Premiere Elements 8 did originally display an error message if you tried to open a project, ie I managed to open an existing project or create a new one, but the program only ever showed a blank screen and no menu options could be selected so these projects were empty. This error message appeared if I tried to open a project I'd just created with premiere elements 8. It didn't even seem to like its own files.
It's a brand new pc, so it's never had any other versions of premiere on it. It came from Dell preloaded with premiere/photoshop elements but only the latter works.
Initially I spent hours trying to get this to work, searching for clues on the Adobe website, but then other pressing things have intervened and I gave up on it until today.
About the last thing I did was to download a trial version and install that and I entered my full version registration number when doing this. Still nada and I gave up.
Well today I had another go. If I opened my empty project from the organiser I got a blank screen, then I tried again from within Premiere. I also tried opening it as a new project giving it the same name as the original. Surprise, surprise, it worked and the monitor and timeline, etc, appeared. However it was temperamental and if I closed the program down I seemed to have to open it a few times in Premiere (not the organiser that never seemed to work) before the workspace appeared.
I should have thought myself lucky and left things like this. When the program started it reminded me that the stuff on the contents disk wasn't loaded. I decided to load it up too but in the process I got an error message. I think it said something about Framework 4 being loaded? by user system and that this needed to be changed. I let it go ahead and do this and left all the contents loading up. Takes a long time doesn't it? Needless to say this isn't the first time I've done this.
Well it was after this that I arrived back at the blank screen, nothing opening up at all just as it was when I started - a little loading project window appears, the blue progress line gets to 100%, but the application screen remains grey and none of the menu options can be selected. I tried loading the 8.01 patch but this made no difference.
Has anyone got any clues on this?
It's a Dell Studio 15, i5, 4Gb RAM, Windows 7 Ultimate, 400 Gb free space.

Answer 1

There may be some clue in that while I was briefly able to use the application I added a few picture files and put them on the timeline.
Tidying up the pictures on the pc into one folder meant that one of these was no longer where Premiere Elements 8 expected it to be and on one of my trys at getting it to run again (with the same multiple attempts at opening a project as before) it did actually display a dialog asking for the missing file and then wonder of wonders the monitor window, timeline, etc, appeared as before.
This meant that the menus are accessible at present and so I've been able to check the background rendering preference and it is set to off.
Once I close the application down again I'm sure it's going to behave as before, ie blank screen again. True enough just tried this and it's back to blank screen mode. I didn't save the project so the files are still 'missing'.
BTW I've already turned off Autoanalyse in the Organiser.