Yes it normally runs fine using any type of account throughout the network, it's just on these new laptops where it's having problems. It's strange, they're not setup any differently than other laptops/workstations on the network, just the specification is considerably better.
The only applications in the CS3 suite which actually work on these laptops are:
ExtendScript Toolkit 2
Extension Manager
Flash CS3 Video Encoder
UPDATE: It seems to be working now! I ran one of the working applications and chose to update CS3 product, following a restart CS3 started up normally.