Premiere Pro crashes after quit - Mac OSX Lion

Question

Greetings,
Symptoms:
I'm experiencing a consistent crash behavior after quiting Premiere Pro (ver 5.5.1 and 5.5.2). The complexity of the project doesn't seem to matter and once it crashes, i get the prompt indicating the app encountered a serious error and will try to save the project. I then get the usual crash report prompt to send to apple followed by the adobe crash report a few minutes later (must be why i see "dynamiclinkmanager" in top for a bit after PP crashes).
If I reopen PP, I'm prompted with a dialog box asking if I want the last project opened. If I say yes, I'm back to a crash before any assets load (unexpected serious error and the app will need to close) followed by the crash reports again for apple and adobe. Basically, i get one chance to make a project and it goes bad when closing the application.
I'm using an install from a DVD, but had also tried the web version. I was able to create a couple projects with the web version (trial) and then when I got the DVD, i believe i used that for updating/authenticating, etc - maybe that's where things went south (anyone else observe a similar pattern?).  I didn't think too much of mixing the DVD content with the web install, so the steps around how i mixed those two sources is somewhat fuzzy.
For reference, i'm pasting the crash report inline. To reproduce, I just had to open PP, click no when asked to open the last project that unexpectedly quit, and then just hit quit and got the crash. I didn't do anything other than accept the project defaults in order to test out hitting command-Q.
If I can provide futher info to help with a repro, please let me know.
Any help is appreciated and thanks in advance,
Todd
<<begin crash report>>
Process:         Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 [280]
Path:            /Volumes/VOLUME/*/Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5
Identifier:      com.adobe.AdobePremierePro
Version:         5.5.2 (5.5.2)
Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [126]
Date/Time:       2011-12-08 21:42:17.998 -0800
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.7.2 (11C74)
Report Version:  9
Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Exception Type:  EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Application Specific Information:
objc[280]: garbage collection is OFF
terminate called without an active exception
abort() called
Message was edited by: Jeff Bellune.  Edited for brevity.

Answer 1

Thanks for reply zikade, here's my rig:
  Model Name:          Mac Pro
  Model Identifier:          MacPro5,1
  Processor Name:          6-Core Intel Xeon
  Processor Speed:          2.66 GHz
  Number of Processors:          2
  Total Number of Cores:          12
  L2 Cache (per Core):          256 KB
  L3 Cache (per Processor):          12 MB
  Memory:          64 GB
ATI Radeon HD 5770:
  Chipset Model:          ATI Radeon HD 5770
  Type:          GPU
  VRAM (Total):          1024 MB
Regarding en/disabling the mercury engine, is there another place to toggle that? I didn't think i had any other choice at this time with my card option (until i get a nvidia cuda card). FWIW, When creating a new project, the options in the drop down menu for "Video Rendering and Playback" is greyed out with "Mercury Playback Engine Software Only" as the selected option.
I was also thinking of putting a fresh Lion install on another disk (bah, would prefer to not have to do this since I have other stuff all nice and set up on current OS install), but at this point I'm fine to take the hit and level the playing field w/ a fresh OS, image that for downstream testing if a fresh install is needed again, and then start installing things one at a time until something goes wrong.
It seems (i hope)  this error could be caused by something pretty basic as it is a complete showstopper. Unless somehow what I'm doing is super unique, there would be other folks out there dead in the water, to, but making waves.