Acrobat hangs up

[qlu_one]

I am trying to help friend of mine who is unable to use Adobe Acroabat on his WinXP Dell machine.
He says Acrobat was used to work just fine until he or someone from his family uploaded something or did something else - he is not sure. We uninstalled and reinstalled various versions of Acrobat (reader and professional) couple of times and still when one attempts to run it, it always begins with an opening screen and an hourglass and just sits there until you kill it with Alt-ctrl-Del. Has anybode else encountered something similar?

[joro2]

Did you get an answer to this? I'm haveing the same issue.

[Larry]

Things to try.  Larry

[qlu_one]

We have tried all the 'solutions' posted on the acrobat web site (see Larry's link) and the only one that works, sort of, is the one that tells you to create a new user account, log on to it and start acrobat from there. So to read your e-mail you log on to your machine as user1, and to use acrobat you log off and then login as user2 - I am not that imaginative to call this a solution.

[ronyeager]

Got to c:\documents and settings\yourusername\local settings\temp and delete all temp files there. I had same problem and found that Acrobat makes many temp files when it runs and after a while has a bad time parsing them during startup.

[keit]

Did you manage to find a solution to this. If not, try this:
Run regedit, go to: Current user/Software/Adobe/Acrobat Reader/....../Adobe viewer
Make a new DWORD value, name it UpdateFrequency and Modify it to 3.
Instead of the dots you should put the number of the version you are using: 5.0, 5.1, 6.0
It worked for me for 5.1 and 5.0.

[tubut]

Thanks to this thread, I was able to fix the problem with Acrobat 6.0 hanging on my XP system. Here is what I found, and a couple of hints that may help somebody else:

As suggested, cleaning the "c:\documents and settings\yourusername\local settings\temp" directory helped tremendously. It appears Acrobat created 65,535 temporary files (0 KB each) named "Acr0000" through "AcrFFFF". I have a hunch that Acrobat uses a 16 bit counter for the temporary file names and that this counter overflows, which causes the application to hang.

A couple of notes:

1. I had to delete the temporary files from a command prompt (DOS window). MS Explorer hung when I tried to delete the files from within Explorer.

2. I had to run "ntregopt.exe" (a free Registry optimizer available at http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/ ) to restore the performance of the file system. Deleting the temporary files reduced the size of my Registry by 2% (!). I ran Ntregopt just before and after deleting the temporary files, so I'm pretty sure that the reduction in size was a direct result of deleting those files.

3. After compacting the Registry, I ran "Disk Defragmenter" to improve perfomance even more. Like ntregopt, I ran this program before and after deleting the temporary files, so I am quite sure that running Defrag improved peformance quite a bit.

Hope this helps!

tubut
 

[cocolina]

I've tried all the solutions below and am still unable to open Acrobat Reader 6.0.1. It hangs on the splash screen. I think it may have something to do with a pdf I tried to view from the web that may have had mathematical fonts in it - it hung and it has never worked since then.
I didn't have loads of temp files, I updated the registry, I tried logging on to my machine as another user, I reinstalled 3 times from fresh downloads after completely removing it.
My tech support people want to totally rebuild my machine but since it took 2 days to build it the first time after they had finished with it I can't go that route.....
Anyone got any other top ideas? Please. I can't read any documentation which is rather essential at times.....

Desperate person....
 

[MadKing]

Sometimes when it's the first time you use it, it's appear to freeze but the program jsut wait you answer to the registration windows which is behind it. Just do ALT TAB to access this windows.

[cocolina]

Good idea but its not that - in fact it doesn't even get as far as being recognised in the application list by task manager, it is only a process usually eating up around 42% of CPU until I kill it.....

[qlu_one]

Unless you are really hooked on having the latest, try installing Acrobat Reader 5. It's faster than 6 even when the 6 works which is not very often. I haven't checked but you probably cannot download 5 from their web site. Instead you need to look elsewhere.  Often, it comes included for convenience with unrelated software packages.

I would uninstall and try remove as much of any remnants of version 6 as possible before installing 5.

qlu_one

I've tried all the solutions below and am still unable to open Acrobat Reader 6.0.1. It hangs on the splash screen. I think it may have something to do with a pdf I tried to view from the web that may have had mathematical fonts in it - it hung and it has never worked since then.
I didn't have loads of temp files, I updated the registry, I tried logging on to my machine as another user, I reinstalled 3 times from fresh downloads after completely removing it.
My tech support people want to totally rebuild my machine but since it took 2 days to build it the first time after they had finished with it I can't go that route.....
Anyone got any other top ideas? Please. I can't read any documentation which is rather essential at times.....

Desperate person....
 

[cocolina]

Thanks for all your help but I found a solution albeit a slightly round about one - I found that Acrobat 5.0 was on our Citrix installation so although not quite so convenient, I'm using that and once again I can read docs. All I can say regarding Acrobat 6 is its an experience that I don't care to repeat!!!

Good luck everyone....

 

[cocolina]

Me again - I found the real solution, finally, after removing 6.0 and installing 5.0 (twice) and finding that I still couldn't start it - giving a message about not being able to open a temp file. This led me back to one of the previous replies about 65000 odd temp files. I had checked in Documents and Settings but checked again and discovered that I had the 65000 (FFFF overflow in hex) no. of temp files in C:\Temp and so it was exactly that same problem that it couldn't read them or create a new one.
I dutifully removed them all and hey presto Acrobat 5.0 works beautifully and I won't be going near 6.0 ever again.

Thanks for all your help guys - suspect this could be a regular problem for other people using 6.0. Motto is that the temp files could be in several places so probably a search for acr*.tmp on C: might pinpoint the problem.

 

[J_M]

Just wanted to say THANKS!

I've been battling with this problem for quite long time. Found many forums with suggestions to the problem but none of them had the answer.

Dump the acrobat temp files, was the fix for me.

Thank you very much.

I only removed the ACRxxxx files, are there ever any important files stored in the temp files such as software registration etc? or would it be safe to do a cleansing of these critters?

regards

J

[cocolina]

Probably someone more techy can answer this fully but there are all sorts of things that find their way into temp directories. I would say that *.tmp type files are usually safe to remove - and if a running application is currently using them it will warn you. You could use a disk cleanup utility either the windows provided one under Accessories/System Tools or something like Norton Utilities. These should cull some that are considered superfluous.
I don't think there's massive danger in removing stuff from temp dirs as required files are not normally written by sensible applications to temp dirs. You may lose the ability to revert to backups if applications crash i.e. Word saves copies of docs in temp files which it then recovers from if the app crashes. However if you are not running the app currently and have all docs saved ok then it should be safe to remove them.

Hope this helps, thanks for letting me know I helped at least one person with this silly Acrobat problem - drove me mad I must say.