Intermittent problems are the most difficult to track down. I have been unable to detect a pattern in the occurence of this behavior by Adobe Reader 10.0.1 but it is happening often enough that our users are complaining and expecting some sort of resolution from the IT staff:
We have on our intranet a number of form-fillable pdf's created by Adode Acrobat. When users open one of these documents in Adobe Reader X and fill them out, they will often save them to the hard drive on their workstation computers for later reference or to finish filling them out at a later time. Often, but not always, when they save such a file to their PC, the Reader just hangs and they have to go into Task Manager and end the process. This is an intermittent problem that happens sometimes on some form-fillable pdf's. I have not determined any common factor in what causes this to happen sporadically to our end users in our organization.
It seems as if the program is looking for a resource that is unavailable or trying to accomplish a task and can't (but keeps trying). We are mostly a Windows XP (SP 3) Professional shop with almost all computers having 1.7 GHz processors or faster and a least 1 GB of RAM. Available hard drive space on the computers where this phenomenon is happening also does not seem to be an issue.
If anyone has experienced this in their organization and knows what the Reader is trying to do when it hangs on saving like that, I am very interested in what you can share. Thanks in advance!
This has the feel of a problem that might be associated with Protected Mode turned on in Reader X. You can try turning off Reader Protected Mode under the Edit > Preferences > General category and uncheck "Enable Protected Mode at startup" Of course, you should be aware of the potential risks associated with doing this by reviewing the Reader Protected Mode FAQ.
Lori Kassuba is an AUC Expert and Community Manager for AcrobatUsers.com.