Here’s what worked for me:
Disabled New User Experience
Running Adobe Pro version 2025.001.20435 (64 Bit) on Win 11
To disable the new experience,
- Click the hamburger menu ( 3 lines ) at the upper left corner and choose Disable new Acrobat
Tools Pane
To prevent the Tools pane from opening by default in Adobe Acrobat go to: Menu > Preferences > Documents and select "Remember last state of All tools pane when opening documents," then collapse the Tools pane, and save.
Navigation Pane / Bookmarks etc (Global Hide)
Right click on open pdf file. Navigate to: Document Properties\Initial View(Tab)\Navigation and change Bookmarks Panel and Page to Page Only. Then save . However, only works for that single document when opened in future.
If you want to turn off panes or all pdf files opened regardless of what set by creator and not have to change initial view and save then edit the registry.
Launch %windir%\regedit.exe
Navigate to: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Acrobat.Document.DC\shell\Open\command
String to be modified is similar to this:
"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe" "%1"
Change to: "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe" /A "navpanes=0" "%1"
Every pdf file from every location now opens up without the panes. Been annoying me for years.