It's usually a bad sign when the file will no longer open even on another computer. Do you get any error messages?

Find, and empty, the InDesign Recovery folder in your user library to keep ID from crashing over and over when it tries to open the bad recovery data. (The recovery folder is in the same folder where the InDesign SavedData file is stored, and the path information for your OS can be found in Replace Your Preferences Note that this folder is gong to be a hidden folder if you run Lion, so you need to display hidden folders in your search).

Once that is done, start InDesign and use FIle > Open... to navigate to the original location where the file is saved. Tick the radio button to "Open as a COPY" and cross your fingers. If you are REALLLLLLY lucky it will open, and if it does, IMMEDIATELY export to .idml, then save the file with a new name as a backup, too. File > Open... and open the .idml file you just made, Save As to yet another name and you should be good to go.

If it doesn't open, do you have any backup copies someplace? If not, you best hope is probably Markzware: Bad InDesign or Quark File Recovery Submission Form

Now some advice on preventing this from happening again (though a crash is outside your control). First, never work directly off a removeable drive, if that's your habit. Copy the file to the hard drive, edit, then copy back to the removeable drive. Do a Save As from time to time to clear out the old, useless and inaccessible change data from previous sessions and reduce the file size. Make backup copies every day. If you do the save as each time you are done working, and add a versioning sequence to the name or something similar you take care of two birds with one stone.

I have the files. The .idml file seems to be damaged in some way -- won't open as .idml and I get an invaled archive message when changing the extension to .zip (John, are you watching this? Want to see it?)

The .indd file seems to be hung, but I'll wait a bit longer before declaring failure as the program is not crashed.

In the meantime, try making another .idml file, if you can get the program to stay open. It may take awhile to finish the export so walk away from the computer for 10 minutes after you've started teh process.

And is there a chance you can post that crash report?

Well, the crash report isn't very helpful. Just seems to indicate some sort of text problem (no big surprise).

I'm on windows, where keyboard navigation is easy, but I think there is a way to run menus on the Mac, too, without touching the mouse. You might give that a try.

And you file is still hung after 20 minutes, so I think it's not going to open at all, but I had one take about an hour last year. It had dozens of pasted vector objects in it -- you don't have anything like that in your file, do you?

Linked vectors would not be an issue -- only pasted.

It may be time to bite the bullet and rebuild from the backup, or send the file to Markzware and pay for the recovery.

Yes, I mean rebuild from an older file if that will open.

If you uninstall the CS6 trial, what will you do? The files cannot be opened in anything else.

You can only install as a trial one time per machine unless you format the hard drive and reinstall the OS, I think.

If you have an older version of the CS6 file that you thing should open, send it to me and I'll export it back to CS5 for you if I can.