To all concerned,
I've seen this behavior occur a few times on Microsoft Windows 10 but not as much as with Windows 11.
I've observed that, soon after an unattended update installs through the operating system (not through the Adobe Acrobat's service updater background process), a system process that is labeled
<Unknown> creates itself as a User account with full read/write access over the Adobe Acrobat user folders and PDF files.
You can try and see for yourself if this is happening.
Right-click on the "Adobe Acrobat DC" shortcut icon, select "Properties"; in the Adobe Acrobat DC Properties" dialogue window that will open up, select the "Security" tab.
Note in the "Group or user names:" section it should only appear listed:
- SYSTEM
- Administrators
- INTERACTIVE
- or any current user accounts that you've created when you first installed Windows, for example
When you click once, to select a Group or a user name from that list, the permissions will be displayed in the next section "Permissions for".
NOTE if your user account's permissions appear greyed out and only allowing:
If it is, try changing those attributes to "Full control".
If you're not able to adjust this for your own user account while you're signed in with that current user account, you may need sign out and do it with the Administrator account (provided that this configuration setting is not controlled/blocked by your organization).
In addition, when you sign in as Adminsitrator note also that these settings shouldn't appear greyed out.
You should be able to click on the "Edit..." button to change those permissions.
And this is the tricky part:
- If your current user accounts appear greyed out and inaccessible when you're using the Administrator account, and you also notice that <Unknown> has full read/write control but none of your other user accounts, delete those <Unknown> accounts.
- A reboot may be required to verify that these changes stayed commited and to verify that this weird system process doesn't recreates itself again during boot up.
The way I fixed this on my end, was by uninstalling the Adobe Acrobat Pro completely, then using the Adobe Labs Cleaner tool before reinstalling and manually cleaning some temp folders and chache folders (including the Acrobat hidden folders in the Appdata directory)
Then I reinstalled Adobe Acrobat from the Administrator account, and granted full control to each of my legitimate user accounts.
So far, it has remained with no issues, but I have to constantly keep an eye on Windows unattended updates to see what is triggering these <Unknown> system processes that act as if they are legitimate user accounts in these security settings.
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