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Willi32657786acfh
Participating Frequently
May 5, 2026
Question

Acrobat Processes hanging in Task Manager

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.

    96 replies

    Participant
    July 22, 2026

    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.

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    Anand Sri Bhattacharya
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    July 22, 2026

    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: 

    1. Process Dumps
    2. AcroMon Logs

    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.

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    Participant
    July 20, 2026

    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.

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    Participating Frequently
    July 20, 2026

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

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    Anand Sri Bhattacharya
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    July 20, 2026

    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: 

    1. Process Dumps
    2. AcroMon Logs

    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.

     

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    Participating Frequently
    July 20, 2026

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

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    Participant
    July 17, 2026

    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. 

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    Anand Sri Bhattacharya
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    July 17, 2026

    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.

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    Participant
    July 22, 2026

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

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    P-S-K
    Participant
    June 19, 2026

    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.

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    Participant
    July 15, 2026

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

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    P-S-K
    Participant
    September 1, 2026

    Unfortunately not, we are still seeing the issue still, versions 26.001.21771 and 26.001.21789 also have the same issue.

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    paul_6627
    Participant
    June 18, 2026

    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.

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    Anand Sri Bhattacharya
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    June 18, 2026

    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.

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    phw36583657hco5
    Participant
    June 15, 2026

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

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    Community Manager
    June 15, 2026

    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

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    elliott87430305
    Participant
    May 29, 2026

    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? 

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    Willi32657786acfh
    Participating Frequently
    May 31, 2026

    Hi,

    We are using Acrobat locally on the workstations.

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    Amal Jaiswal
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    May 22, 2026

    Hi ​@Willi32657786acfh  ​@davidjcullie  ​@Mantleloop 

    Hope you all are doing well and thank you so much for your patience while we've been working with our engineering team to get to the bottom of it.
     

    To help them investigate further, could you help us out with a few things the next time the issue happens?
    • If you notice any pattern around when it occurs, a specific workflow, a particular type of PDF, or a certain action that seems to trigger it please let us know. 

    • A screenshot of Task Manager showing the hanging Acrobat processes would be really helpful. If you can, please enable the 'Command line' column (right-click the column headers in the Details tab) so we can see exactly how each process was launched.

    • Lastly, a memory dump of one of the stuck Acrobat processes would give engineering a lot to work with. You can create one by right-clicking the process in Task Manager and choosing 'Create dump file', then sharing the file with us.
     

    Once we have these, our team will be able to dig deeper into the root cause.
     

    Regards,
    ~Amal

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    Willi32657786acfh
    Participating Frequently
    May 28, 2026

    Hi ​@Amal Jaiswal ,

    Thanks for your response.

    I have collected the logs using the Adobe diagnostic tool.

    Here is the log ID: 3cc940d0-6da7-444b-8bca-b071df056193

    Also, the option to create dump file for Acrobat processes is grayed out (the option is enabled for other processes).

     

    Hope it will be helpful to solve the issue asap.

     

    Thanks.

     

     

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    Meenakshi Negi
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    May 28, 2026

    Hi Willi32657786acfh,

     

    Thank you for providing the required information

    We will share it with the product team for further review.

     

    Thanks,

    Meenakshi

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    Meenakshi Negi
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    May 11, 2026

    Hi All,

     

    Thank you for your patience. 

    The team is currently investigating this behavior and requires the logs for further analysis. Please collect the logs by following the steps outlined in the help document linked here:: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/acrobat-diagnostics.html.  Once you have collected the logs, please share the generated log ID with us. This will assist the team in identifying and reviewing the logs.

     

    If you need any assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out.

     

    Thanks,

    Meenakshi

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