Acrobat Won't Open but is a Background Process - Windows 11

Report · Dec 27, 2024

Hi All.

I had a very frustrating experience with Acrobat Pro ceasing to open on my Windows 11 laptop after it not having a problem for years. I do like Acrobat and use it everyday but was tempted to cancel out of frustration.

However, I would like to present the solution that worked for me as I see others having the same frustration.

I read what we all have from re-installation, Acrobat installation cleaner, and even deleting my Windows user account (yikes). In a few places Adobe has stated that this is a Windows problem, which is actually not fully true.

But I noticed something. This might not be true for all of us but it may be helpful to some. I have a personal (read local) user account and an Office 365 work user account with the Office apps downloaded to the laptop. Both accounts can see and use Office.

The local account can see and open Acrobat without any issue. The work account did not. The difference is not the machine and the OS. I figured it was the difference is the user autentication.

Searching further I found that Adobe has a video that discusses using Azure for authentication. The process was quite simple and documented in this video. https://youtu.be/t0JCxmCgook

If you have access to the Adibe Admin Console as part of your software subscription - sign in. Your Admin Console profile must have adminstrative rights. The next step is to setup a directory and then add Azure to the directory for authentication.

It allowed Acrobat to open in my work account. Yet, only a few times then is staring giving some error messages and not opening.

I reverted to using the AcroCleaner (https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Labs/cleaner.html) and reinstalling Acrobat Pro.

Voila! Its been a few days now and everything is working as expected.

Yes, there may be a other reasons this issue arises. But it took way too much sluething even to piece together this solution.

I hope this can help other fellow Acrobat Users.

Best of luck.

Happy New Year.

Toddles

Report · Dec 31, 2024

Hi,

I hope you're doing well.

Thank you for providing detailed information and a workaround for the issue—it will be helpful for other users. If you encounter any further product-related issues, please don't hesitate to reach out.

For future reference, you can check these articles:

I hope this information is helpful.

Thanks,
Anand Sri.