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Windows Installer configures Acrobat 8 repeatedly

Forum Index > Deployment & Installation > Windows Installer configures Acrobat 8 repeatedly
2007-05-14 14:35:18
mcwinans
Registered: May 14 2007
Posts: 4

On one user's computer, Windows Installer starts up and announces that it is "configuring" Acrobat 8.0 every time that the user right clicks on something. Using Windows Installer's verbose logging function, I found and fixed a couple of permissions errors in the Classes section of the registry, but without resolving the basic problem. Uninstalling/reinstalling the application makes no difference. Is this a known issue, and if so is there a fix for it?

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2007-05-17 14:24:15
#1
dthanna
ExpertTeam
Registered: Sep 28 2005
Posts: 248
How was the installation created? Adobe supplied CD/Download or using the Enterprise Customization Wizard (a.k.a. Da' Kustomizer)

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

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2007-05-17 15:39:46
#2
mcwinans
Registered: May 14 2007
Posts: 4
It was installed using a copy of the files from an Adobe-supplied CD which are stored on a network share. Out of the dozen or so computers we've installed Acrobat 8 to so far, this is the only one that has shown this behavior.

But wait, there's good news -- I finally discovered the answer after doing some searching on the Adobe User to User forums. The problem occurs because the installer is setting overly restrictive permissions on some of the Acrobat-related registry keys in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, which prevents non-admin users from accessing information that they need. Here is a link to the thread:

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc34e46/12

After some experimentation on a test computer, we determined that whether the problem occurs or not seems to depend on what permissions are set on HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT itself. If something happens to change the permissions from the default at this point in the tree, then keys that inherit their permissions from it may be too restrictive. One can (as the poster on the Adobe forum did) reset the permissions on individual keys and subkeys, but there are a lot of them, and doing it this way doesn't entirely solve the problem. The simplest solution seems to be to reset the permissions on HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT back to the normal default, after which normal inheritance takes care of the rest. Like any direct editing of the registry, this solution is not for the faint of heart, but in this case it seems to be the only thing that works.
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