Indeed, I had some issues because of that when working with illustrator today

I don't think this has been suggested yet.

I don't have SMART drivers installed and don't have the config files, either. But I found a solution that worked for me for Illustrator CS6:

Go into your user/library/preferences/

Delete/rename all of your Illustrator preferences files (there should be a folder) and also the com.adobe.plist file (note: this will lose your preferences).

Restart the computer.

This worked for me on multiple launches of Illustrator and I restarted a few times since as well - still working.

I know this is an easy solution, but it worked for me perfectly. Didn't want to have to launch a script just to run a program everytime.

@bloodyelle & Ian Kelleigh: Unfortunatly, this did not work for me. Even after restarting I still get the same message.

I guess this is the most up-to-date thread on this problem; for what it's worth, here's my (strange) experience:

AI was working fine on Mac OS X 10.7; after I upgraded to 10.8 ('clean install') I started getting the error. I tried everything suggested on the forums and Adobe's official help page, to no avail. (sudo-ing didn't work either; it wouldn't let me save anything?!)

Then today everything just went back to normal. The only change I made with the computer in the meantime was to re-install Parallels Desktop 7, and perhaps 3 restarts. There was no change in AI's behavior after the first restart. After the second restart, AI would run for only one session—after I quit and wanted to come back, I got the error, again. Now, it's 'back to normal'.

I'm not confident that things will stay this way, though. This isn't exactly a 'crash' either, so there's no report to send to Adobe. I guess the best we can do is to keep these threads alive.

I was getting this error randomly, too, but it seemed to be happening only when Illustrator CS6 was opened along with CS5.5 apps such as InDesign or Bridge. Now I open only apps belonging to the same suite at the same time -- don't mix and match -- and the error hasn't occurred since. May be just be a coincidence, but perhaps CS5.5 and CS6 don't play well together.

Steve

Such a frustrating error...

I've just run repair disk permissions and restarted my iMac and hey presto the Illustrator is working without issue.

Previously tried the Adobe official solution which would get it started but there were some odd side affects on the interface.

Hopefully this might help some of you.

I was getting this error and didn't have any of the files or settings listed in Ivan David's post. I downloaded the file he provided and ran it to use Illustrator briefly, until an unrelated keyboard issue forced me to restart. After that, Illustrator seems to be back to normal.

So, if nothing else, try a reboot? I'll repost if the issue crops back up; it may be related to a process or app that was running on my system before the reboot.

I was having the same issue and I stumbled into this discussion and i had no luck with the script nor with the file search. Then I tried bloodyelle solution, to delete Adobe preferences file (com.adobe.plist) : i tried this myself before but forgot to restart my mac after...this time it worked like a charm with the only minor issue of my preferences loss. Just a reminder for Lion users: by default library folder is hidden (user/library/): to reveal it just open Terminal and type:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

et voilà, it will show up.

Anyway, it's really sad Adobe could not provide this solution before and that they didn't even try to fix this problem, only suggesting a poor workaround which, in my case, didn't even work (Illustrator would boot but i wasn't able to save my files).
Hope this will help.