CS3-Some applications will not start, including Photoshop

I have Creative Suite 3 Design Premium running on a new laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1. I bought the laptop and installed CS3 about 3 weeks ago. Everything ran fine for a while but now I am unable to open Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. I can run Acrobat and Bridge but Illustrator and InDesign do not start at all. Photoshop tries to start, but then disappears before it is fully loaded. I've seen posts where there have been issues with the installation failing to load, but my install went fine. Today I re-installed and repaired with the same result. I have not yet uninstalled and re-installed.

My laptop has 3.0 GB memory and 230 GB hard drive. Any advice will be appreciated

Sounds like you have a corrupted file that is affecting several programs. If this was happening in Bridge I would say you would have to get the "reset preferences" window. In Bridge, uninstall and re-install will not affect the preferences file, so problem will remain. See if there is a similar command for creative suite design.

Now today I'm finally getting an error message that I hope will get me closer:

"Licensing for this product has stopped working.

You cannot use this product at this time. You must repair the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling this product or contacting your IT administrator or Adobe customer support for help."

I followed < http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb 401528&sliceId=2> as far as I could, but when I get to resetting the permissions, the steps shown don't match the dialog boxes I am getting and I don't want to make things worse. So that's where I'm at. If anyone knows of a more accurate list of steps for resetting permissions, please let me know.

There are numerous posts from awhile back about photoshop regarding it stopped working and needed to be relicenced. Did not read them so can not offer suggestions. Might try to search this site or knowledgebase for that topic.