Adobe Reader DC keeps updating itself to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC!!!

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We use Adobe Reader on our terminal servers and it had been working perfectly fine up until recently.

For the last couple of months Adobe Reader has decided to automatically upgrade itself to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC every once in a while, asking all currently logged in users to sign into Adobe Reader with their Adobe ID, which they don't have because our company doesn't have any Acrobat Pro licenses. This will sometimes happen once in two weeks, or twice in two days! It seems sporadic and happens on all of the server in the farm.

As soon as I receive a report that Adobe is asking a user to sign in, I check the Application log in Event Viewer on that server for event 11707 and lo and behold, there's an event in there from a few minutes ago saying something like:

"Product: Adobe Acrobat DC (64-bit) -- Installation operation completed successfully."

To fix this, I've had to uninstall Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and install Adobe Reader from https://get.adobe.com/reader while the server is running and users are logged in, which makes the users understandably annoyed as they've been kicked off all of their PDFs for the 5th time in a month!

This week I got fed up and looked into other ways to install Adobe Reader and found you can sign up for an Adobe Reader distribution license and obtain an installer from a separate link. I installed this verison of the app (which is sadly 32-bit but doesn't make much of a difference in our environment) and things have been stable for the past three days and I'm hoping it'll remain that way...

Any idea why Adobe might have kept updating itself completely unprompted?

The only thing I can think of is that a user tried clicking the Edit PDF button and signed up for a free Acrobat Pro trial, but that requires a valid credit card but I can't imagine they signed up for that many trials...

Or maybe that particular user had an Adobe account with an expired Acrobat Pro trial and when they signed in after clicking Edit PDF, it upgraded the whole app to Acrobat Pro DC for all users? Isn't is supposed to ask users for an admin password before updating an app for all users on the server?

I'm keen to put this one to rest because it's been driving me mad.

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Lee22150724jxtn

Participant

This is happening to our 2016 RDS farm too! We thought we where suffering from the known Adobe Reader Sign in bugs until you actually signin and realize its offering a 7 day trail because the account hasn't been assigned a Acrobat Pro license.

The obvious give away (when launched) its updated is the title bar changes from "Adobe Acrobat Reader DC"

to "Adobe Acrobat Pro DC"

So even though the upsell (and sign in) was specifically disabled in the Acrobat Customization Wizard for the Reader installer MSI - something has triggered the bad update!

So, as suggested I've not only disabled the Adobe update servicem, we've applied an GPO Applocker policy to deny C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\Extract\DiskImages\AcroPro.msi

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Trevor O

Participating Frequently

It looks like a bad update from Adobe. The automatic update check installed using AcroPro.msi. The Event Viewer log for event 1042 MSI Installer "Ending a Windows Installer transaction: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\Extract\DiskImages\AcroPro.msi. Client process ID: 65308"

For now we've disabled the automatic task that updates Acrobat.

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Alec5EA0

Participant

Trevor O

Did this fix the problem disabling the update Task?

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Trevor O

Participating Frequently

I just found this on one of our servers. Out of 3 in a cluster 1 got "upgraded" to Acrobat DC 64bit on 10/19. Not sure what the cause was but thanks for detailing ot what you found!

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defaultsarbi3uwmr42

Participant

Same issue here - Terminal servers (ours are 2019)

Very annoying - no offical reply?

@whydoyoukeepupgrading - did the redist verion fix this for you?

cheers

James

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