Yeah, I guess in my hurry I left out a lot of detail. First, I tried deleting the preferences, Then, I tried unmounting the drive I was using so I had to reselect my scratch disk. After that, I crated a new user so I would have to create new preferences again. Then I tried repairing my disk permissions. Finally, I did most of these while restarted between launch attempts.
Thanks for the cloned drive advice. That will be very helpful.