Let me start by saying that if I am the only one who was affected by this, I apologize for taking up your time. Having said that, I installed the 8.2 update for Acrobat Pro yesterday afternoon (January 14). I use Creative Suite versions CS through CS3 at work. After installing the update, Illustrator CS and CS2 refused to launch, and InDesign CS refused as well, giving me an error message about not being able to find a serial number. The CS3 applications (InDesign, Illustrator) seemed to be unaffected, and none of the versions of Photoshop were affected.
After trying various fixes (deleting caches, removing preferences files), including restoring one of the programs from a backup, I booted from a clone that I had made earlier in the day (before applying the update). Everything was working fine there, so I restored my main hard drive from the clone and everything now works as it should. I did not reapply the Acrobat update after the restore.
I did not think about repairing permissions (sorry, I forgot).
Since I'm back up and running, I'm really not asking for help. I offer this in case others have had a similar problem. And, if I am the only one, I'm just thankful I had a recent backup from which to restore. Thanks for reading.