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dc79873445
Participant
January 30, 2019
Answered

Unable to browse shared drives in Adobe PDF reader

  • January 30, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 10049 views

Hello,

I'm overlooking a case at work where someone is unable to open any PDF documents based on shared drives. I have tried the following to no success:

>Uninstalling and reinstalling Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.

>Made sure it is the most up to date version.

>Turned off 'preferences>Security (Enhanced)>Enable Protected Mode at Startup'.

>Found the application file installed on the PC and enabled 'Right click>shortcut tab>Advanced...>Run as administrator'.

>Found the application file installed on the PC and made the user an admin for Adobe via 'Right click>Security tab>Edit>Granted the user full control of the application'.

>Made the user a local administrator on the PC.

>Recreated the local profile.

I can confirm the following from all my troubleshooting:

>PDFs located on the local machine can be opened in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.

>I can copy documents from any shared drive to the local machine to open them.

>This user is the only one in the company experiencing this issue.

>This issue has only started in the past week.

>While adobe is open, if I go to 'File>Open', the shared drives will not even be listed.

I have found that while going through 'File>Open' I can type the folder location with the IP address of the shared drive into the file path instead. Example \\xx.xx.xx.xx\Shared\etc. However, if I map the shared drives or add them as a favourite location using IP addresses, Adobe will still not detect these locations and not list them. Files can only be reached by typing out the file location in its entirety.

I've now hit a brick wall that I cant seem to figure out any further, any suggestions that I haven't tried would be welcome.

Thanks in advance.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer dc79873445

Resolution has been found by a couple of colleagues of mine. See their log entries below:

First:

Move security enhanced protect mode and security mode no joy

uninstalled adobe dc and reinstall same faulty

adobe reader dc doesn't allow network drives to be shown

Second:

I started by starting Acrobat Reader and resetting the config/preferences and warnings. When I did that Windows told me that there was an issue setting Acrobat as the default PDF reader and reverted to Edge. I manually set the association and then started looking for problems! Saw that Acrobat was unable to access network drives; it wouldn't even present them in File/Open/This PC. Google told me that was most likely due to 'Run As Administrator' being set. That made sense because when run as administrator is used the application takes the administrator's drive mappings (among other settings), which in this case there are none. That would explain the 'file not found' error. I also looked to see if (Colleague from the post just above)'s change of disabling privilege mode was enabled by checking the registry. It was, so I just disabled 'Run As Administrator' and bob was my uncle.

2 replies

Y
Yoimy23039788ve4t
Participant
August 8, 2024

Just do this 

Acrobat Reader DC uses a feature called Protected Mode to secure your computer against malicious PDF documents. In rare instances, Protected Mode can also prevent the program from loading. Hence, try disabling it.

Since you obviously can’t open Acrobat Reader DC to disable Protected mode, you must use the Registry Editor for that.

Step 1: Press Windows+R, type regedit, and then click OK to open the System Registry.

Step 2: Copy the following path into the address bar of the Registry Editor window and press Enter:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\DC\Privileged

Step 3: Double-click the registry entry labeled bProtectedMode.

Step 4: Set the value to ‘0’ and click OK.

D
dc79873445Author
Participant
January 31, 2019

Further Updates:

I tried to completely remove the PDF reader with the following tool and reinstall the program, but it did not work either. Shared drives are still not being picked up:

https://labs.adobe.com/downloads/acrobatcleaner.html

D
dc79873445AuthorCorrect answer
Participant
February 7, 2019

Resolution has been found by a couple of colleagues of mine. See their log entries below:

First:

Move security enhanced protect mode and security mode no joy

uninstalled adobe dc and reinstall same faulty

adobe reader dc doesn't allow network drives to be shown

Second:

I started by starting Acrobat Reader and resetting the config/preferences and warnings. When I did that Windows told me that there was an issue setting Acrobat as the default PDF reader and reverted to Edge. I manually set the association and then started looking for problems! Saw that Acrobat was unable to access network drives; it wouldn't even present them in File/Open/This PC. Google told me that was most likely due to 'Run As Administrator' being set. That made sense because when run as administrator is used the application takes the administrator's drive mappings (among other settings), which in this case there are none. That would explain the 'file not found' error. I also looked to see if (Colleague from the post just above)'s change of disabling privilege mode was enabled by checking the registry. It was, so I just disabled 'Run As Administrator' and bob was my uncle.

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