Incredibly frustrating FrameMaker/PDF problem (long)

[Berk/Devlin <armadill -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

Help, please.  I'm having a bad time with FrameMaker.

Background:

I have a FrameMaker 5.5.6 document that is nigh on 490 pages, now.  But my 
problems may have begun when my document crept up past 250 pages.  Or, they 
may also have started when, in the dead of night, and in a fit of 
stupidity, an associate installed InDesign 1.5 onto my computer.

My PC (a Pentium 667 with a very, very large amount of RAM and 15 GB of 
free space on the local hard drive) is part of a network on which are 
installed approximately five Windows 98 PCs (they come and go).  On each PC 
is a licensed copy of FrameMaker 5.5.6.  Each of these installations of 
FrameMaker used to be able to generate a PDF of the document in question.

However, at this point, when I try to save as... PDF on my PC, it starts, 
gets about 200 pages into the document and then:

FrameMaker terminates without warning.
Distiller does NOT start.
Explorer crashes.
Other programs that I have been foolish enough to leave running report "Out of
Memory" errors.
I reboot.

    Side note to the overly-grammatically correct: hereinafter I
    will refer to the process of "Saving as PDF" with the verb "to PDF".
    I am at present too distraught to agonize about adding just one
    more verb to the English language...

However, on the PCs (slower, smaller, less space on hard drives, attached 
to very same file server) on which InDesign was never installed, I can PDF 
this very same document, no problem.

On my PC, the problematic one, I can PDF every chapter in this document, if 
I do it one chapter at a time.  But if I try to save the whole book as a 
pdf --
CRASH!

Here's what I've done to try to fix this problem:

1.  I uninstalled InDesign.
2.  I uninstalled Acrobat and re-installed it.
3.  I uninstalled Acrobat and FrameMaker and re-installed them.
4.  I uninstalled Acrobat and FrameMaker and Adobe Type Manager and 
re-installed them.
5.  I uninstalled Acrobat and FrameMaker and Adobe Type Manager, 
re-installed the operating system and then re-installed the applications.
6.  I tried to upgrade to Acrobat 3.02.  However, if I try to install the 
upgrade after I've uninstalled Acrobat 3.01, I get an error.  And when I try
to install it with Distiller installed (and running), the installer just
displays the readme file.
7.  I ordered the upgrade to FrameMaker 6.0.  But, it's on backorder.

Suggestions, please.  Feel free to make them off-list, as I assume this is a
very unique situation.  If anything works, I'll post back to the list.

TIA,

Emily
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