Why are applications (like Adobe Fireworks and Appcelerator Titanium) crashing on startup?

According to your crash log (thread 7 crashed) - it's trying to start up the updater and the updater is crashing attempting to read the preferences - so it's quite possible several of your preference files have been corrupted.

First thing I'd recommend is to open up Disk Utility, click on your startup drive and click Verify Disk to be sure that it's not a symptom of directory damage. If that checks out fine I'd recommend deleting the appropriate preference files from your Preferences folder (eg. com.adobe.Fireworks.plist from your Preferences folder) and see if that sorts things out.

Try 'Repair Permissions' in Disk Utility, that's a generic fix for some problems so it's worth trying. Sometimes files in /Library/Application Support can get corrupted during a crash, you could remove the applications causing the issues and then remove their folder from /Library/Application Support, then empty the trash and reinstall those apps.

I had a somehow similar problem before, where InDesign CS5 would crash on startup right after I installed it for the first time. It turns out that the Adobe installer program had left all of the Adobe-related Library files as read-only. Very odd behavior, indeed. According to the Adobe support forums, I was not the only one to have had this problem.

My suggestion is to open a Finder window and go to a path that will look very similar to:

/Users/YOUR-USER/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 7.0. 

Of course, you must replace YOUR-USER with your user account and Adobe InDesign with whatever Adobe program you are experiencing problems with. Also, your version number might be different. On this example, InDesign CS5 is Version 7.0, but that might be different for your version. Browsing to the Adobe-named folders within your Library, it should not be hard to find which is the right one.

Once you have found and selected your folder, open the File menu, and then select File/Get Info. On the last pane you will find the Sharing and Permissions options. Expand this pane, unlock the settings for this folder by clicking on the lock button, then press the plus sign (+) button. Add your user account and assign it Reading and Writing privileges.

Reopen your Adobe program and it should be able to start succesfully. The problem is most likely that it is not being able to write to its settings files within the Library special folder.

Hope this helps.

Called Apple, they suggested I re-install the OS. Originally being a PC guy that sounded like I was going to have a couple days ahead of me to backup, format, re-install my apps etc.

NOPE. With OS X you can re-install the OS and not affect any of your programs or user data/documents. So it just copied over all the core OS files and that seemed to fix everything.