Printers gone, can't add printers, making PDFs

Suddenly all my printers and Adobe Distiller are gone from my (in-application) print dialogues. !! Truly this happened suddenly, with no apparent cause. I did nothing unusual. No new software, no deletions. Did recent update to 10.4.7.....
And no printers show up in Printer Utility, and i can't make them appear. When i try to create default, i see an error: 'server-error-server-unavailable'.
I can still make PDFs from within an application (like Finale), but nothing shows in the Printer field. It says only 'No Printer Selected', and there is no printer to select.
I have already reset the printing system a few times.
Restarted the powerbook several times.
I tried deleting all relevant prefs - com.apple.printer etc, distiller, acrobat.....
I have Acrobat 7.0.8 and Distiller 7.0.7, but normally it works ok to use the 'Create PDF' in any print window.
What causes this? Where did all my printers go?
Has anyone else experienced this?
Incidentally, i have also had a billion problems with fonts. I am trying to print a book of music created in Finale. Within that app i open the print window, create PDF, then collect PDFs together in Acrobat to make the book. I found that changing anything in Acrobat would make certain fonts bold. !! Tried 20 different thing then found that if i opened each PDF in Preview and saved it AGAIN as a PDF, the problem would go away.
So now i want to try using Distiller to create the PDFS, to see if i can skip the step of using Preview.
Thanks for any help, comments, whatever,
Mark

update:
I am able to create PDFs as i said above, using the normal mac 'save as PDF' choice in the print dialogue. And i can print normally.
But i still cannot print to distiller. That is, if i choose 'adobe PDF' as the printer, the (in-app) print window goes through the normal motions, but nothing ever shows in the Adobe printer, and no file ever results.
I have tried (not in chronological order):
deleting prefs
updating distiller
updating printer drivers
reset print system, re-add printers incl. adobe PDF
repairing disk perms
updated cupsd.conf
i am about to:
re-update from standalone installer.
I do think that my problems were the direct result of updating to 10.4.7.
Thanks for the tip about fonts btw. I did go through and found several surprisingly bad fonts, i mean like Schoolbook and, i forget, i think Arial and common, Apple-supplied fonts, that you'd think would just never go bad. huh. I used these in the files in Finale, and maybe that was the problem. They are done, it was a lot of work and now i am unwilling to go back and change fonts, thus restaring the whole finale->PDF->PDF again->collect-all-PDFs-together-in-one-huge-file->number pages (which is where the problems with fonts would show up, fairly late in the process) etc etc.
There are several other threads in this section of this forum, which deal with this same (more or less) problem. I am sorry, don't have time to get the refs right now.
i will keep trying, and keep posting here.
m

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