I am unable to open Adobe Acrobat DC unless I run as admin

Forum|Forum|2 months ago
February 24, 2026
4 replies
177 views

After the latest update to 25.001.21223 I am unable to run Acrobat on Windows 11 unless I choose to run Acrobat as administrator. If I run it as a normal user the program will appear briefly in task manager then will silently crash. After looking at event viewer I can see that it is crashing with “Faulting module Acrobat.dll” 0xc0000005.

I’ve tried repairing the install, checking that protected mode is disabled, re-registering the dll file, checked folder permissions and ownership, acrobat cleaner tool, fresh install of acrobat, cleared adobe cache, sfc scan, ran without plugins folder, updated visual C++ redistributables, windows updates, editing the registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe|Adobe Acrobat\DC\Privileged and added DWORD bProtectedMode set to the value of 0.

None of these have worked for me. Any help would be appreciated.

JmountainAuthor

Participating Frequently

Update:
I was able to briefly get the program to work as a normal user by running the Acrobat Cleaner and installing the 3/10 25.001.21288 update. After about a week of use the issue returned.

Currently I am on the 4/2 26.001.21367 update and have not experienced issues yet, however I have only been on this update for about a day. I will update again later if this patch has resolved my issue or if it returns again.