Discovered that my recent installation of a flash drive to utilize the Vista RapidBoost feature (lets one use the drive as a chache drive, purportedly to speed up loading apps at bootup) breaks Encore CS4, leading it to hang at the splash screen at "initilizing transcoding." Found the answer on the Adobe Forums Encore site, after three fruitless days with very patient Adobe support people who had no clue. Removing the drive made an instant fix.

Removing Quicktime 7.6 and rolling it back to 7.5.5 cured launch problems with Soundbooth and After Effects; for the Mac version, forums are saying that 7.6 conflicts with AC3 audio codecs, so maybe it's the same problem for Windoze. Hope this information will save somebody some grief....// Battle Vaughan/miamiherald.com video team