Participating Frequently

Question

Acrobat Processes hanging in Task Manager

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
May 5, 2026
51 replies
1715 views

Since 2 months ago we experience something weird with Adobe reader on our hosts.

Users are reporting that PDF files are not opening. I checked that and I found there are a few Adobe processes that running in the task manager.

When killing the processes and reopen the file it start to works.

We tried reinstall and updating a few times to the latest version. Nothing works.

Have you encountered this?

How to solve it?

Thanks.

K90

Participant

Hello,

Mr. Wili,

I am facing the same issue most likely with Windows 11, First, I thought it is RAM issue, and when I checked, absolutely there is no issue with RAM. I tried this following solution and it worked; Therefore, check the following steps:

Open the task manager.
Check on the background process and end task to the Acrobat running processes, and don’t forget to end task to Acrobat sync
then launch the acrobat software, and click on the 3 dots.
Go to help ==> click repair installation, then in the help menu, click Check for updates.
Then on the 3 dots go to Preferences ==> Then select Security (Enhance)
Uncheck ‘Enable Protected Mode at startup’ and ‘Enable Enhanced Security’ boxes.
Then relaunch Acrobat and PDF files
Check the registry keys possibly this is one of the causes.

Re-installing the Adobe Acrobat won’t solve the issue because I’ve tried that.

Anand Sri Bhattacharya

Community Manager

Hi All,

Thanks for your patience and cooperation on this.

The fix has been deployed with the latest build of Acrobat/Reader version: 26.001.21745 Planned update, Jul 23, 2026.

Please install the latest update from the Menu > Help> Check for updates, and restart the machine after installing the build.

Let us know if you experience any issues.

Regards,

Anand Sri.

Willi32657786acfhAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi @Anand Sri Bhattacharya,

Thanks.

It seems that the same issue appears now on the new version also: 26.001.21771

It worked for a while, until the next new version released...

I have a few hosts reported the issue today. Multiple Adobe Acrobat processes are running in the background.

Can you please check?

Amal Jaiswal

Community Manager

Hi there

Hope you are doing well and sorry to hear that the issue still exists, please collect the memory dumps and ProcMon logs of Acrobat. Use the diagnostic tool to collect the logs and share them with us so our development team can investigate further.

~Amal

I

Insurance IT

Participant

Posting this to help find the commonality. It has been a solid 3 months we’ve had this issue. All users are on some hardware version of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 or later. Sometimes it will launch if the file source is in Outlook (Classic), but it won’t launch if the file is in File Explorer or from a download. Or vice versa. This is with Use page cache, Enable Protected Mode at Startup, and Enable Enhanced Security all disabled.

Anand Sri Bhattacharya

Community Manager

Hello @Insurance IT and @Hunted85

I hope you are well, and sorry for the trouble you had.

I have sent you an email to the address you used to log in to this community platform. Please check your email and share the requested information.

Also, could you please collect the following logs and share them with us for further investigation:

Process Dumps
- Capture process dumps of any Acrobat and/or AdobeCollabSync processes that remain running in Task Manager.
- Please refer to the guide for steps: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/collect-logs-crash-freeze.html
AcroMon Logs
- Collect AcroMon logs from the affected machine.
- Instructions are available here: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/acrobat-diagnostics.html

Please collect the logs and share them with us by attaching them to this thread or uploading them to any cloud storage and sharing the file link with us.

Thanks so much for your cooperation and patience on this. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or need any assistance.

Regards,

Anand Sri.

H

Hunted85

Participant

Hi,

We are seeing this issue as well, it’s impacting users inside and outside of Citrix. Is there a way of following the public patch status, as we have a lot of customers that we need to keep up-to-date with this issue. Downgrading the version isn’t an option for us from a security point of view.

Thanks.

S

seth10550

Participating Frequently

We’re having this same issue. I have to educate the staff on taskkilling Acrobat’s processes and it’s quite tedious.

Anand Sri Bhattacharya

Community Manager

Hello @seth10550

I hope you are well, and sorry for the trouble you had.

I have sent you an email to the address you used to log in to this community platform. Please check your email and share the requested information.

Also, could you please collect the following logs and share them with us for further investigation:

Process Dumps
- Capture process dumps of any Acrobat and/or AdobeCollabSync processes that remain running in Task Manager.
- Please refer to the guide for steps: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/collect-logs-crash-freeze.html
AcroMon Logs
- Collect AcroMon logs from the affected machine.
- Instructions are available here: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/acrobat-diagnostics.html

Please collect the logs and share them with us by attaching them to this thread or uploading them to any cloud storage and sharing the file link with us.

Thanks so much for your cooperation and patience on this. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or need any assistance.

Regards,

Anand Sri.

S

seth10550

Participating Frequently

Sure thing, next occurence I’ll gather that info and share. :)

H

Hly273

Participant

We have users experiencing this as well and I am wondering what the status of this issue is or if there is something that I can follow the progress.

Anand Sri Bhattacharya

Community Manager

Hello @Hly273

I hope you are doing well. The fix has been identified and is going through internal validation. We’ll update the thread once it is available with the public build very soon.

Thanks for your patience on this.

Regards,

Anand Sri.

H

Hly273

Participant

Thank you. I look forward to hearing an update. We have some very frustrated users for sure.

P-S-K

Participant

We are seeing this issue in both a customer using Windows 365 (Windows 11Enterprise 25H2, Windows Defender Plan 1) and a customer that has local devices. (Windows 11 Business 25H2, ESET Endpoint Security). We have other customers that are (so far) unaffected and we can’t really see a pattern to identify what the differences are between those affected and those not.

We were able to mitigate this in version 26.001.21563 by applying the following registry fixes:

HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\DC\FeatureLockDown
HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown
bDisablePDFHandlerSwitching DWord -Value 1
bEnableAcroRd32PreLaunch DWord -Value 0

26.001.21662 is experiencing the issue even with this set.
We have now pushed out to also include:
bProtectedMode DWord -Value 0
bEnhancedSecurityStandalone DWord -Value 0
bEnhancedSecurityInBrowser DWord -Value 0

I will update this post when I have feedback from the end users.

The issue seems to occur fairly randomly. When it crashes, if you kill the processes and open the same files as before it will (usually) be fine again for a while, so there does not appear to be anything within those specific files.

The diagnostics link reports that it will not run within a virtual environment, so I will only be able to obtain details for the customer with local devices, but if there is anything outside of this log wise that I can provide please let me know.

T

Twinsen

Participant

have you had any update with this man? happening to multiple users \ computers….

paul_6627

Participant

We’re hacing the same problems on the 2 machines running CC. Literally dozens of processes, every one needs to be manually ‘end task’ed before PDFs will open again. It’s really frustrating.

Anand Sri Bhattacharya

Community Manager

Hello @paul_6627

I hope you are doing well, and we’re really sorry for the trouble you had.

The product team is identifying the root cause and developing a fix. We will update the thread as soon as we receive any information from the product team, and the fix is released publicly.

Thanks for your patience and cooperation on this.

Regards,

Anand Sri.

phw36583657hco5

Participant

Hello. The same issue is occurring as for others. My OS is Windows 10 22H2.

T

Tariq Ahmad Dar

Community Manager

Hi @phw36583657hco5,

Thank you for joining this thread and for confirming you are seeing the same behavior on Windows 10 22H2.

This issue is currently under active investigation by our engineering team. To make sure your environment is included in the analysis, we need a few things from you.

Please collect diagnostic logs using the Adobe Diagnostics tool by following the steps at https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/acrobat-diagnostics.html and share the generated Log ID here.

Could you also share the following:

Your current Acrobat version, which you can find under Menu > Help > About Adobe Acrobat, and a short screen recording of the behavior when it next occurs, showing the hanging processes in Task Manager with the Command Line column enabled (right-click column headers in the Details tab to enable it).

In the meantime, please try this as a diagnostic step: go to Edit > Preferences > Security (Enhanced) and temporarily uncheck Enable Protected Mode at startup, restart Acrobat, and let us know whether the hanging behavior changes. This helps us understand whether the sandbox is contributing to the process hang in your environment.

We appreciate your patience while our team works toward a resolution.

~Tariq

elliott87430305

Participant

We’ve been having the same issue for while now. Constantly having users report same issue where they cant open PDFs and killing the processes fixes. Our environment is Vmware (Omnissa) Horizon on Windows 2022 server.
Are you also in a virtual environment?

Willi32657786acfhAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi,

We are using Acrobat locally on the workstations.

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