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Participating Frequently
July 14, 2025
Question

Adobe Acrobat Reader crashes without error message for signed documents

  • July 14, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 618 views

Situation and error description

1. reader crashes without error message if you want to set a signature with certificate or if a PDF signed in this way is opened/signed.
2. signed PDFs can generally not be opened, neither by double-clicking nor by “Open file” via an open Reader. It does not matter whether the signature is from the internal CA or was created by an external party.
3. PDFs without a signature appear to work, but crash immediately when signed.
4. no error message is displayed.
5. no error is written in the Windows event log.
6. the problem has been occurring since about the last 3, 4 or 5 released versions.
7. 2025.001.20566 is currently installed.
8. the problem occurs mainly on 2016 RDS servers, of which there are several, but also occasionally locally on Windows 10/11 computers.

 

What has already been tried

9. uninstallation: folder cleanup and reg. cleanup + reinstallation = error remains.
10. repair installation without computer/server restart: the error is gone, but comes back after server restart/new user logon.
11. cleaned up the Adobe reg. values of the user during operation and with the RDS user logged on, also cleaned up GPOs for Adobe, all Adobe folders in the user profile %appdata% ... deleted.
After opening the reader, the first start including EULA query etc. appears as expected = the problem persists, signed PDFs or PDFs to be signed crash immediately.

1 reply

Participating Frequently
July 14, 2025

Addition
Regarding point 10: it is not always possible to make the reader work afterwards (repair installation).

12. Protected mode deactivated at startup = error remains.

S_S
Community Manager
Community Manager
July 14, 2025

Hi @Enlightened_Rainbow0D44,

 

Hope you are doing well. Sorry for your experience with using signed documents on Acrobat Reader.

 

Since you have shared most of the details, it would be helpful to have a few more pieces of information to investigate further:

1. Does the crash occur with any digital certificate you try to use? To test, can you create a new digital certificate, sign the file, and check if the behavior is the same?

2. Please help us gather logs from your machine: https://adobe.ly/4l1gBRA. Please make sure Procmon is selected. You can upload logs using this tool and share your Unique log ID with us. 

 

Look forward to hearing from you.


Regards,
Souvik.

Participating Frequently
July 16, 2025

to 1.: as I wrote under 2. it does not matter which certificate. Files with digital signatures from third parties are also affected.

to 2: I have created a diagnosis. Who can I tell the ID to?


Again in addition to point 10: I now had an RDS where it occurred 2 days in a row and I was able to adjust it. When I wanted to test it again today, the problem did not occur on this server and with this one user.