Process exists hangs

Question

Somewhere along the line of the past few months I installed an update (from Apple?) that broke applescripts on my mac (10.5.8). As far as I can tell it's limited to scripts that determine if a process name is running. For scripts that I have written, ScriptEditor converts the "exists process" keywords to "exists «class prcs»" which is new to me. This script will hang until it times-out with "Apple event timeout". This is true for scripts that I have written as well as Microsoft software updater for office that runs an applescript (I've seen it in Activity Monitor) to determine what software is running and needs to be closed.

Answer 1

(Tom_X)
tell application "System Events" to set ffopen to exists process "Safari"
if ffopen then
say "Safari is active."
else
say "Safari is not active."
end if
Clicked Compile, after about a minute of a spinning pinwheel I get error: A """ can't go after this identifier.
And it highlights the first quotation before the first instance of "Safari"
I replaced all quotation marks and typed in my own to make sure I didn't carry over fonts into Script Editor- Same error without pinwheel.
(Andreas)
if exists process "Safari" then
    say "Safari is running"
else
    say "Safari is not running"
end
After clicking Compile I get error: Expected "then", etc. but found """.
Same thing...
It highlights the first quotation before the first instance of "Safari"
I replaced all quotation marks and typed in my own to make sure I didn't carry over fonts into Script Editor- Same error without pinwheel.
(Andreas)
tell application "System Events"
    if exists process "Safari" then
        say "Safari is running"
    else
        say "Safari is not running"
    end if
end tell
Same result...
After clicking Compile I get error: Expected "then", etc. but found """.
It highlights the first quotation before the first instance of "Safari"
I replaced all quotation marks and typed in my own to make sure I didn't carry over fonts into Script Editor- Same error without pinwheel.
(Andreas)
tell application "Finder" to if exists process "Safari" then beep 2
Compiles
After clicking Run I get pinwheel for about a minute and then (regardless of whether Safari is running) I get error: Finder got an error: process "Safari" doesn't understand the exists message.
I replaced all quotation marks and typed in my own to make sure I didn't carry over fonts into Script Editor- Same error WITH pinwheel.