Acrobat 8 on laptop - IE7 wants Acrobat 9 - now - error msgs galore!

Sorry for the long post but I am at my wits end.

I am a medical practice adminsitrator (not a computer expert) - have Acrobat Pro 8 as part of CS3. I receive hundreds of emails that I need to keep and index. My Outlook 07 is DOG-SLOW (even though I have a screaming machine) so I started using Adobe Pro 8 to archive and remove emails - thinking that I'd keep the folders to minimum size and maybe Outlook would be faster.

The major list-serve I have to use every day for my work changed their GUI and to access it they said I had to upgrade to IE7. Since then I've had nothing but trouble with Adobe.

First, the error message I got said that it couldn't find Adobe Pro at all - so I did some Google research and found that I needed to delete Adobe Reader 9 and its components. I then rebooted. It now can find Adobe Prof 8 again - but now it can't/won't imbed indexes when archiving my email folders. Argh.

I am just about ready to move all Adobe products to a separate laptop! My experience has been that once Adobe is installed anywhere on my machines, the conflict and freezing starts with all other programs. However, I DO love the applications. I am a long time user of PageMaker and now InDesign.

My thought is that I should move the hog (Adobe CS 3 and all its components) onto another machine. Perhaps that would free my work machine up and make it fast enough for daily operations. However, for legal and operational reasons, I need to be able to quickly access the archived emails if necessary(hence my use of Adobe Pro 8).

I know there's always the whole "uninstall and reinstall" thing as a fall back position but I fear that my IT guy would threaten to take my computer privileges away - ha!

Finally, I am not getting a good feeling about the state of Adobe code. Is it me, or is it released into use with lots of bugs that have not been worked out?

Any ideas? As I said, I really love the programs and have droppoed quite a bit of change on these programs.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.