Adobe Acrobat Reader is a dirty little bastard, leaving droppings in the park and never cleaning up after itself. On Friday I was having “issues” with Reader not opening. The splash screen would pop up, disappear, and then nothing would appear afterwards.
Restarting the app just launched another process, so all I ended up with was a bunch of apps consuming memory and cycles, but no window appeared. I removed and re-installed with the lates version, but still no working Acrobat Reader.
So, like any good geek, I trolled Google for answers. I found mine here.
Sure enough, there were 65,535 temporary files generated by Adobe Acrobat in my temp directory (actually, they were in \Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp). I whacked them and, like magic, Reader worked again.
How annoying, although not as annoying as stupid anti-v policies which require on-demand scanning of any file that is read or written (which makes file deletion times entertaining).
Subsequent trolling also turned up the Acrobat Reader Speedup application. This is a handy little utility which allows you to enable/disable all the junky plugins that you never need with Reader to assist inreducing startup times and prevent reader from starting embedded in Internet Exploder. Nice little app.
That’s why my system at work SUCKS ASS. I’ve given up allowing the system to delete files. If you hit Cancel, the file disappears AND you get to have your life back.