Adobe Reader & Acrobat no longer co-existing in harmony

I'm been having a nightmare of a time with the latest Adobe update. Previoulsy Adobe Reader & Adobe Acrobat would live happily on the same machine. We have a number of standalone workstations and some 2019 terminal servers. roughly half the users have named Acrobat licenses and the other have has no need to edit PDF documents and just needs to occasionally view them. Previously I could force Adobe reader to become the browser control (view pdf in browser addon) by running a repair on Adobe Reader after Adobe Acrobat was updated. Now this no longer works and adobe acrobat always hijacks the browser addon no matter what, leaving reader users with a grey screen unable to view PDF documets. Furthermore uninstall/reinstall no longer works as when you install Acrobat it overwrites ("upgrades") Reader and if you try to install reader over acrobat it says a comparable program alreay exists. What gives Adobe? Is it so hard to have Acrobat behave in Reader mode if a named user is not logged in? has anyone found a solution to this issue and have the 2 products co-exist after these latest updates?