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Adobe Acrobat Freezing constantly.

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
December 19, 2023
44 replies
195127 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

Amal.

Community Manager

Hi All

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out.

Would you mind collecting the Crash/freeze logs https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/collect-logs-crash-freeze.html and 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

M

MatsGunnarsson

Participant

Don't remember where I found this bu it helped for me. My Acrobat have been freezing and crashing for about a week now. These steps fixed it for me.

1. Edit>Preferences>General>uncheck "Show online storage when saving files"
2. Edit>Preferences>Security enhanced>uncheck "Enable Protected Mode at startup".
Restart Acrobat.

If that doesn't work.
Help>Repair installation

N

networka45947651

Participant

We're having the same issues. 3 of our users have reported the freezing already. Any permanent fix???

N

networka45947651

Participant

Happening on v 23.006.20380

M

michaeld41589159

Participant

Can confirm we are having these issues across the board on every CC installation. Adobe Reader is freezing up at load or closing and often cannot open multiple PDFs without crashing. The problem is spilling over to peripheral apps like Illustrator and Photoshop. I have seen improvement after disabling new Acrobat, turning off Enhanced Security, and running a repair.

M

michaeld41589159

Participant

correction - meant on Acrobat Standard (not Reader)

T

tobym

Inspiring

I have the same, or similar - soon after opening Acrobat some sort of dialogue half loads, with a spinner, and Acrobat never recovers. This is on Windows 11 and it's really frustrating.

G

gspice1980

Participant

Hi @tobym, I have seen this issue as well. On mine it was caused by a signature issue, however it was possible to clear the dialougue by pressing the esc key and I could then get back into acrobat.

The difference was that I only saw the"spinning box" come up when I tried certify a document, so it may not be the same issue.

For the amount of money we pay per user per month for acrobat, some of the bugs that seem to go unfixed is bad.

G

gspice1980

Participant

I am also haing this issue, I have Acobat Pro on two seprate PCs, both on Win 11 fully updated. As of this week, everytime I open a docuemnt in Adobe, it freezes/hangs for 5-20 seconds, norally when the docuemtn is first opened. Once it clears then normal operation resumes for a while.

joela19740897

Participant

Finally got an answer on this one - there's a glitch in the most recent Adobe update that causes conflicts with security applications. You can follow these steps to correct:

Open Acrobat > Menu > Disable new Acrobat.
Edit > Preferences or (Ctrl+k) > in the Categories:

General > Uncheck show me messages when I launch Acrobat
Accessibility > Uncheck "Enable assistive technology support"
Reading > Pages vs Documents > Do not read documents
Search > Maximum Cache: 100000 MB then Purge Cache Content
Security > Uncheck "Use SafeLogic"
Security Enhanced > Uncheck "Enable Protected Mode" and Enable Enhance Security

Close Acrobat and Open run from the start menu of Windows > type "temp" and clear all the content that can be deleted
Open run from the start menu of Windows > type "%temp%" and clear all the content that can be deleted
Open run from the start menu of Windows > type "prefetch" and clear all the content that can be deleted

Hopefully they'll roll out a patch to correct across the board as this is not going to be fun rolling out across fifty users.

D

defaultm8d7zxwov1yn

Participant

Thanks for posting this--do you know how critical steps 3-5 are? It seems like that could cause issues with non-Adobe applications that rely on temp folders and I'm not excited about introducing new issues.

P

Paula34686589y6nm

Participant

Did you test with just steps 1 - 2? I

D

defaultm8d7zxwov1yn

Participant

Chiming in with another report of the same issue. We're a small shop (just 30 licensed Pro users) but 2 have reported it in the last 24 hours, and I'm sure more will come out of the woodwork. All on version 23.008.2042x

D

DONNA25196663u275

Participant

Anybody on to this fix yet, been dealing with the lag for days now - not good for paid subscriptions

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!

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