Enable Adobe Acrobat updates

The main thing I'd avoid is trying to force this through a collection of registry changes. Adobe's update mechanism has changed across Acrobat generations, and the exact behavior depends on whether these are Acrobat/Reader DC installations managed by your organization.

For 35 machines, I'd approach it as an endpoint-management problem rather than manually starting AdobeARM.exe on each PC.

A few points worth checking:

• AdobeARMservice is part of Acrobat/Reader's update mechanism, but simply setting the service to Automatic doesn't necessarily mean updates are enabled.

• Check Acrobat → Help → About Acrobat to identify the exact product/version installed.

• In Preferences → Updater, check whether automatic updates are enabled. In a managed environment, Group Policy/registry settings can override this.

• Be careful with HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\... because a policy setting may be deliberately preventing updates. A value of bUpdater=1 generally permits the updater, but I'd verify the policy against the particular Acrobat release rather than assuming all of those registry values are required.

• I wouldn't remotely invoke AdobeARM.exe as the normal update mechanism. Let Adobe's updater/service perform the scheduled update process.

For troubleshooting, I'd first take one affected machine and compare it with a machine that does update successfully: Acrobat version, updater preferences, Adobe services, scheduled tasks, policy registry keys, and the updater logs. That will usually reveal what's different much faster than adding registry entries blindly.

If you can provide the Acrobat version/build from one of the affected machines, I can narrow down the correct updater configuration and where to look for the relevant logs.

Thanks. Your feedback would lead me to believe that Acrobat was installed via the Admin console.

From looking at the links you provided, it looks like I have to run RUM to update the clients. Do you know how RUM handles updates when the Acrobat application is open? What is generally recommended as the best user experience to use RUm to update Acrobat?

Thanks again,

Andrew

Hi,

I appreciate your help and reply. The AdobeARMservice exists but it was set to disabled. I have set it to auto and started it.

I'm still figuring out the installer. I believe it was installed via a link that someone created in an adobe portal or something, sorry I'm not up to speed on that yet. I need to speak with them to find out.

The software is Acrobat standard as the dell file with the version number that is showing its old and a vulnerability is Adobe acrobat DC\acrobat\acrobat.dll.

I tried running adobearm.exe previously but nothing happened. I'll enable verbose logging and look for the logs now.

The other thing was that when I opened acrobat on one of the users machines, there were no options in preferences to enable auto-updates and there was no option under help > check for updates, it didn't exist. I found a repair option which took 20+ minutes and did actually update the software. 

​Hi @athletic_goal9770 ,

Thanks for the detailed write-up, that's a solid starting point.

A couple of things would help confirm the right path here: are these 35 devices running Acrobat Reader, or Acrobat Standard/Pro (the GUID and registry paths differ between them), and were they originally installed via the MSI or EXE installer? Also, does the AdobeARMservice Windows service actually exist on these machines currently, or is it missing entirely? That matters because if the original install used the DISABLE_ARM_SERVICE_INSTALL property, the update service was never installed, and just flipping registry values won't bring it back; you'd need to install it separately.

On what I can confirm: your bUpdater FeatureLockDown key and the general registry-based approach match Adobe's documented enterprise updater configuration. For the service specifically, if it's missing, it can be installed manually by running:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\AdobeARMHelper.exe

Then confirm the AdobeARMservice service exists and is set to Automatic.

To manually trigger a check/update rather than waiting for the scheduled task, running the following works for both diagnostics and forcing the update:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\AdobeARM.exe

For logs, once you run the above, check the user's Temp folder (%temp%) for a file named AdobeARM.log, and any MSIxxxxx.log created around the same time in the same folder, that's the update installer's own MSI log. For more detail than the default log, verbose logging can be enabled first via:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Adobe\Adobe ARM\1.0\ARM, value iLogLevel = 1 (DWORD)

I don't want to confirm every one of your specific registry values (the Mode/iCheck/iCheckReader keys) without a definitive source in front of me, since getting this wrong at scale on 35 machines could cause more work, not less. It would be worth cross-checking those specific values against Adobe's Enterprise Toolkit Windows Registry Reference before rolling this out broadly: Enterprise Toolkit documentation

Let us know whether the service exists on these machines and what product/install method was used, and we can narrow this down further.

~Amal