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Constant Crashes with Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended

robinwilson16
Registered: May 5 2010
Posts: 3

Hello

I always have real difficulty getting this program to work correctly.

Is there a downloadable installer which contains the latest updates where the program will install and work properly yet? i.e. a full 9.3.2 download without having to install 9.0 and then update twice to get the program to work correctly? Even with 9.3.2 it is bugy and unreliable.

I have to install version 9.0 which will then fail to open with a C++ error message saying pure virtual function call (I can't remember exactly). I was originally told by Adobe that this was not a bug and it was my system even though it happened on every PC I tried to install on. It turned out it was due to them not testing the program with roaming profiles/folder redirection which a lot of people use. It then took over a year for them to manage to fix this.

Luckily a fix is now available so at least I can use this expensive piece of software again without having to give everyone local accounts for their PCs. The update does not work though. If I download the 9.3.2 update from the Adobe website and try to install, it tells me that the program to be updated is not installed and refuses to update the program.

If I log in locally and then go to Help > Update, the updater tells me a new version of the updater is available and needs to be installed. It downloads this and tries to update, at which point a command window appears and then I get a message saying the program has stopped working correctly and must be closed.

I can however run it from the program files/common files/adobe/updater6 directory
This then installs 9.2 and I have to restart and repeat the process for 9.3.2 and restart again.

Then it is hit and miss whether the program will automatically just close after accepting the licence agreement or work correctly.

In cases where it doesn't I have to uninstall and go right back to the beginning.

Working in IT the adobe reader has always been one of the more problematic software packages but version 9 is worse still and has caused years of headaches. I'm just pleased not many people need to edit pdfs and for the rest FoxIT Reader and PDFCreater will surfice.

I am currently needing to install it on quite a few PCs and having to go through this process every time is very time consuming. Is there a better way?

Thanks
Robin

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro Extended 9.3.1, Windows
dthanna
ExpertTeam
Registered: Sep 28 2005
Posts: 248
Robin,

Having a 26,000 seat corporate install base of Reader with at 6,000 seat install base of Acrobat and not found the product to be any more or less buggy than any other in the industry, given it's shear size, scope and capabilities. It's not a widget app.

We do not use roaming profiles and I have yet to find a company that has completely successful in implementing them.

In understanding, as much any anyone can outside of the Acrobat Engineering team, the tight-coupling of how Reader and especially Acrobat integrate into a system's workstation it's no wonder that roaming profiles are being problematic.

If you would like to dig into the details on how Acrobat integrates into Windows please let me know. We may be able to find an ultimate solution to you problem.

Between fonts, print, spooler, app, GUI, browser, desktop and user integration along with the several thousand registry settings (90% of them in HKCU), the product is neither small nor trivial in its integration. Out of the 1000+ applications we have packaged for our corporate deployment infrastructure I can honestly say that Acrobat is the most difficult product in the kit. But, it's value to the business makes it worthwhile to suffer through the deployment pains.

My suggestion would be that if you wish to 'roam' people's desktops in this manner that you can try one of several options. 1) Use CITRIX (or a similar tool) and publish the app. 2) Use CITRIX and publish a desktop 3) use VMWare and virtualize the machine instance on a server 4) Buy everyone laptops.

Please note: If using CITRIX, anyone that has access to launch the application, whether or not they use it (if they can use it is all that counts) they must have a license for it. I am not aware of any concurrent license model for Acrobat within hosted type environments (I wish there was).

Please understand, I am not trying to be harsh here. But am trying to help you to understand the reality of your situation. Like many things, roaming profiles is one of those things that looks great on paper but has a hard time standing up to reality. Windows has always been designed as a user-centric OS. Even their server products are highly user centric in design.

I do apologise for not being able to provide you with greater assistance.

Sincerely,

-Doug

Douglas Hanna is a member of the Production Print Technology team at Aon.
www.aonhewitt.com

robinwilson16
Registered: May 5 2010
Posts: 3
Hello Doug

Thanks for your help and advice. When debugging the reader with the C error it was trying to write to the folder above the user's profile which obviously it did not have access to and there was no error handling so it just crashed and exited.

No program is perfect but at least other programs give us helpful errors rather than just unexpectedly exiting.

The problem is that after going through all my steps listed above logged in as local admin, the thing still fails to load and will just close after the licence. I have read that this can happen if the licence key is invalid but this is not the case.

It seems that on the machines it fails on (exiting after accepting the licence agreement), no amount of reinstalling seems to fix it. Is there a way to reset the licence info in the registry so that it will re-check it and then realise it is in fact valid?

The problem I have is it works locally if not updated but won't work on roaming profiles (due to C error), then if I update it it doesn't work at all due to just exiting after I accept the licence agreement.

Also I have to accept the licence agreement everytime it opens as if it wasn't able to write to the registry and store the fact I have accepted it. Then it just closes about two seconds after pressing accept. If I leave the licence agreement on the screen and don't accept it the application will stay open for as long as I leave the licence agreement there (but then I can't interact with the pdf I have open. I tried the manual workarounds to accepting the licence agreement which Adobe suggest which include using the enter key rather than the mouse and doing a registry edit to manual say I have accepted but neither worked.

On some machines it is fine and on others it just refuses to work. The machines are all fairly new installs of Windows 7 x64 although I got the same behaviour when I tried a Vista machine.

I would appreciate any further advice you could give.

Thanks
Robin