Upselling gets triggered, deployment of Adobe Reader on Microsoft RDS environments.

Dear Sir or Madam

We are an IT service provider in the greater Zurich area and provide Adobe Reader for our end customers on our around 100 private cloud environments.

Unfortunately, we have been experiencing more and more problems in the past, which can currently only be controlled by switching off the update service. Unfortunately, we are not in a position to contain this, which is why I am contacting you with my request.

Our issue is that we are successfully providing the Free Adobe Reader and it is running so far. If a customer then “voluntarily” logs into Adobe Reader in the Adobe Cloud services, this can trigger the so-called upselling process, which then updates the software to Adobe Acrobat Pro on the entire terminal server environment without requiring administrative rights. As a result, users without a subscription will no longer be able to open PDF files overnight. We are not the only ones who find this procedure very unpleasant and we would like to curb it in the long term.

We use the Adobe Customization Wizard to adapt the installer using Transform Files, i wanted to attach the file to the inquiry, but .mst is not supported in the field - if you want that, pls give me a way to send that to you.

We also use a group policy for each end customer, which sets the following keys:

Unfortunately, all our measures do not prevent upselling. Worse still, once this has happened, it can no longer be rectified without stopping the update service for good.

We take the following steps to clean this up, but they don't work:
- We uninstall the software
- We clean up residues of the software with the Adobe Cleaner Tool
- We delete all files and directories under
o “C:\Program Files\Adobe”
o “C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe”
o “C:\ProgramData\Adobe”
o “C:\Users\*USERNAME*\Appdata\Local\Adobe”
o “C:\Users\*USERNAME*\Appdata\Roaming\Adobe”
o “C:\Users\*USERNAME*\Appdata\LocalLow\Adobe”
- *USERNAME* signals to us here that we are really cleaning this up on an RDS environment for each user which takes a lot of time.

Hence our questions:
Can you please answer in as much detail as possible how we prevent this upselling process from being triggered without turning off the Adobe Update Service?
Can you please answer which RegKeys/folders/files need to be cleaned up so that the upselling does not start again IMMEDIATELY when the program is started for the user who triggered it?

Unfortunately, the problems are increasing and we don't really know how the best practice could work. Your documentation on the Internet has already been implemented. Various opinions in internet forums are contradictory and have little validity.

We would very much appreciate your support in this matter in order to remedy this in the long term.

greetings from switzerland, have a nice day!