Participant

Answered

Adobe Acrobat Freezing constantly.

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
December 19, 2023
140 replies
198463 views

Over the last few days, everytime I and a few other Adobe Acrobat users just open the app, it hangs and we need to wait for it to respond. Sometimes it works, but it is unpredictable. This was not an issue last week. I have updated to the newest version via updates yet it still happens. I paused virus scanning w/o any improvement.

I also tried to disable enhanded security and protected mode, but that does not seem to help either.

Do you have any suggestions, this is quite annoying.

General troubleshooting

Correct answer johhnyd68650275

Hi all! In case my experience could help anyone:

I also got this "white square" with "spinning circle" which made Adobe Acrobat Reader DC hang/freeze. But, here we are talking about the application beeing published in an on-prem Citrix site, as a "seamless application", and also using the 32-bit Norwegian version, running on Windows Server 2019. In addition, it's packaged as an AppV-application, not locally installed. Nevertheless we have been running this setup for quite some time, and only this last week (from after April 1st) the issue has occured.

What seems to fix it in our case is adding the following registry setting via GP Preferences:

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\DC\FeatureLockdown

Value: bWhatsNewExp

Data: 0x1 (DWORD)

From Adobe:

This feature was phased in incrementally over 2022. When enabled, the default user on first launch will see a What's New screen as well as a See new features notication. These UI items appear once. Possible values include:

0: Enable the What's New experience.
1: Disable.

So, after disabling it (= setting the value to 1) the problem disappeared!

Show previous replies

j.calo

Participant

We have users who are also experiencing freezing. It seems to be isolated to Acrobat Pro and not Adobe Reader.

Users have been running one of these two builds:

23.008.20421

23.006.20380

j.calo

Participant

Adding this setting to our environment (via a GPO) seemed to have resolved our slowness/freezing issues with Acrobat Pro.

Edit>Preferences>Security enhanced>uncheck "Enable Protected Mode at startup".

A few years ago, we applied this setting to Adobe Reader using a group policy setting. Back then, Adobe Reader was exhibiting slowness and freezing when launching PDFs from one of the financial application that gets used across the enterprise. However, it seems that we never applied this same policy for Acrobat Pro. We noticed this on Thursday, and then updated our policy to include the same reg key for Acrobat Pro.

These are the reg keys in question that configure the policy:

Path (for Reader): SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\DC\FeatureLockDown
Path (for Acrobat Pro): SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown

Reg Value Type: DWORD
Reg Value Name: bProtectedMode
Reg Value Data: 0

I don't expect this to work for most folks in this thread since it seems that many have already tried, but I wanted to mention it anyways.

C

craigg15814085

Participant

This solved the issue for me. Thank you!

I

IT02u4ijfdfa

Participant

We're having the exact same issue - dozens of reports. I've gotten some prelimary information that the issues may have some correlation with Outlook being open - possibly the Actrobat Outlook plugin?

N

Nicky265666147l7y

Participant

I totally just closed out Outlook and it worked!

M

maryanns96133176

Participant

Same problem here and same troubleshooting steps. Happening on a good few of our users.

D

douglas34384451zb7p

Participant

happening to me too, just started this week

C

Care34356916gpi2

Participant

I am having the same problem and even uninstalled and reinstalled the program. Would really like a fix for this ASAP.

J

jasen berry

Participant

happening to me too

Amal.

Legend

Hi there

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out.

Would you mind sharing the steps you are doing to when the application freezes? A small video recording of the same would be very helpful for more clarity?

What is the version of the Acrobat DC you are using? To check the version go to Help > About Acrobat and make sure you have the recent version 24.01.206XX installed. Go to Help > Check for updates and reboot the computer once.

Also try to repair the installation from the help menu (Win Only) and see if that works.

Please try to reset the Acrobat preferences as described here https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/how-to-reset-acrobat-preference-settings-to-default/td-p/4792082

If it still doesn't work, would you mind collecting the Adobe CC logs https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-log-collector.html , Procmon logs (Win Only) https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Labs/acromonitor.html and Crash/freeze logs https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/collect-logs-crash-freeze.html share them via any cloud storage. Just upload the log file to the cloud and generate the link and share that link with us for further investigation.

Regards
Amal

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.