Acrobat 8.1.6 PDFmaker stalls Excel/Word 2003

I have spent 3 days pouring over suggestions from several places and I am still having problems. I just purchased a new laptop and now after installing Adobe Acrobat 8 I can not create PDF's on this new computer.

Here are the details: Vista 64, Adobe Acrobat 8 (upgraded to 8.1.6), Word/Excel 2003. I have registered and activated adobe on the new computer.

---I do have a PDF printer listed in control panel.
---It is set to the "documents" port
---I am able to print to file and then convert in distiller

There are probably several other tests I did that I am forgetting to list. Whenever I try to print to create a PDF, the process stalls after seconds and the application freezes.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Everything worked perfectly on my previous machine which was also Vista.

Thanks alot!

RT