Blog: Adobe Reader

I was working with a customer who uses QuickBooks, and they stopped being able to view PDFs saved in QuickBooks. I tried a few things and even got QuickBooks support on the line to help troubleshoot. They were unable to resolve the issue, but the rep did give me a link to a KB. The link stated that Adobe Reader DC was not supported by QuickBooks and recommended going to Adobe Reader 11.

When QuickBooks does not find a compatible PDF reader it defaults to IE, and IE sees the \\ as a URL and tries to open a nonexistent site. So the solution is to downgrade to Adobe Reader 11. Then you have to make sure that the file you open in QuickBooks is not still pulling the UNC name. You can check this by pressing f2 and looking at the "Location" it should not start with \\. If it does, then you need to close out of QuickBooks, map a network drive to the shared folder that the QuickBooks files reside ie...\\DC1\QBData for instance. Reopen QuickBooks and open the file from the mapped drive you just created. When you press f2 now, the "Location" should say N:\DC1\QBData (or whatever your mapped drive is).

Here is a link to a KB providing a step by step - https://community.intuit.com/articles/1437250

 

 

I recently ran into some problems where the Adobe Reader process (Acrord32.exe) was using the maximum available CPU resources constantly. Even after Adobe reader program is closed, the process remains running in the background continuing to use all of the available CPU resources. Through research I found that the issue has been reported on Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 2003 (TS and Citrix), Windows 2008 R2 (TS and Citrix). The issue only seemrf to occur when version 10.1.3 was installed as a new installation and not upgraded from a previous version (according to some people’s notes).

The Adobe Reader default install allows "Adobe to display in-product marketing messages while you work in the program". When you launch Reader. the "open recent documents" window that shows during launch includes ReaderMessages along the bottom of the window or may be displayed as you view PDFs. These message are downloaded from Adobe and probably stored in the ReaderMessages file stored within each user’s APPDATA portion of the profile. I'm guessing there is corrupt content in one of Adobe recent messages causing Reader to stay in memory or use high CPU once the application is closed. [more]

To stop the issue, disable the Messages from Adobe by modifying the following settings.

1. Select Edit - Preferences – General
2. Uncheck “Show me messages when I launch Reader”
3. Check “Don’t show messages while viewing a document”
4. Close Reader (and manually kill process if necessary) and reopen 

Note that the following settings are ‘per user’ and must be set by each individual user. To address the issue on a global level, consider doing the following:

• Modify the Reader 10 customization transform file to include the necessary registry keys to disable the settings (would require a reinstall of the application)
• Modify the Default user profile to include the necessary registry keys to disable the settings (would only affect new users logging into the server, current users profiles would have to be removed for the settings to take place)
• Import the registry values using group policy or a login script; if using windows 2008 R2 servers, group policy preferences will import the registry settings very easily

Here are the registry key values that need to be set:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\10.0\IPM]
  • DWORD "bShowMsgAtLaunch" to 0
  • DWORD "bDontShowMsgWhenViewingDoc" to 1

I had recently upgraded Adobe Reader to version 10.1.2 and my printer would only print a blank page when I tried to print a PDF document.  The printer lights would blink, and all print jobs after that would not print until I physically rebooted the printer.  I thought there might be something wrong with the PDF that I was trying to print until it happened to me again with another file.

I came across a knowledge base article from Adobe last updated 1/25/2012, http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/928/cpsid_92870.html that gives a link to a patch for being unable to print at all, and it mentions that Duplex is set to “ON” by default after the upgrade. 

Unchecking the Duplex option allowed me to print successfully.  The patch may help others in troubleshooting print problems.  As Adobe Reader updates get installed on our customers’ PCs, we may have an increase in support calls.

After installing a new computer and upgrading to Adobe Reader 10.1, a user was unable to print PDFs in portrait orientation to a Xerox printer. The documents printed correctly to an HP printer. When printed to a Xerox printer, two portrait pages were shrunk and printed to one landscape page (like a book). To fix this error, you must follow the steps below on each printer affected. This will make the printer print exactly what is seen on the screen, just like it was a picture. 

• Click Print
• Click Advanced
• Click Print as Image

Adobe Reader 10.0 is installed in a protected mode. One of the features of the secure mode is:

• Cannot open PDF files whose source is DFS or NFS: PDF files in shared locations on a distributed  or networked file system (DFS/NFS) cannot be opened. Attempting to open such a file results in an error opening this document. Access denied."

The solution is to disable protected mode by completing the following steps: [more]

1. Within Adobe Reader, go to Edit > Preferences > General and deselect Enable Protected Mode at startup.
   
2. Restart Reader.

For more information, refer to the following Adobe KB article: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/860/cpsid_86063.html

A user was having problems opening Adobe PDF files from Internet Explorer getting an error that the file could not be found.  The file could be saved to desktop and then opened from there just fine.   From what I could tell, IE was trying to save the PDF file to a folder in "%Userprofile%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5".

From my admin account, I could browse to the user's Content.IE5 folder, but the user's account was not able to see or browse to this folder at all.  This was causing problems being able to save anything to Temporary Internet Files for retreival.  I checked the permissions on this folder and they all appeared to have sufficient access.

In order to fix this, the Temporary Internet Files for the user needed to be recreated.  This was done by going to Tools, Internet Options, clicking "Settings" under Temporary Internet Files, and selecting "Move Folder".  It will list the current location, so simply select the same location and it will recreate the entire thing. 

After this was done, the user could browse to Content.IE5 folder and save/open PDF files in Internet Explorer.

From Adobe:

A critical vulnerability has been identified in Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 and earlier versions. This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this issue is being exploited.

Adobe states that no update is currently available, but they expect to have an update released by March 11th, 2009. In the mean time, customers are encouraged to keep their virus definitions current and real-time scanning active.

For more information about specific vulnerabilities, please refer to the following websites: [more]
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa09-01.html
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/905281