How to stop shortcuts from opening in Reader instead of Acrobat

[Nellie5C4E]

My employer has a subscription to Adobe Acrobat. For years, I've used this to combine PDFs into one document or convert documents to PDFs using the right-click shortcuts in Windows Explorer. Starting this morning, attempting to use these shortcuts opens up Adobe Reader and gives me the following error message:

"You are currently using the free Reader product. You also seem to have the more functional Adobe Acrobat installed on your machine. Click OK to launch Adobe Acrobat."

• Clicking okay opens Acrobat, but it doesn't perform the action I attempted through the shortcut window.
• If I attempt to perform the action through the shortcut window again (with Acrobat open), nothing will happen.
• If I attempt the action manually in the Acrobat program, it will be successful. But I would like to be able to use my shortcuts again because it saves much time.

Is there any solution that will stop my shortcuts from trying to open in Adobe Reader?

[try67]

Why keep Reader at all? Uninstall it and use only Acrobat.

[Nellie5C4E]

I can't uninstall programs without the help of our company's tech department. I was hoping to not have to involve them, but if there isn't another solution I suppose I will.

[Help16B7]

I'm helping someone with this exact same issue. We initially uninstalled Reader only for it to be installed again several days later. This does resolve the issue but only temporarily. Hoping there's a more permenant solution available.

[Adam26354005n7ch]

Interesting, I just started having this issue at work today as well. We have both Reader and the pro version, and now the shortcut just opens Reader and does nothing, because Reader can't combine files. Must be some new update causing a bug, hope it's fixed soon.

[andre_0582]

See post for fix: Post 

Issue only started with ver 25.001.20630

shoutout to @mike00001 

"For anyone not wanting to wait for Adobe to relase an update to fix this, I found replacing C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat Elements\ContextMenu64.dll with the ContextMenu64.dll from the pervious version 25.001.20577 fixed everyone so far."

[Tariq Ahmad · Accepted solution]

Hello, 

It is not recommended to use both Reader and Acrobat. 
To avoid this issue, Adobe has released the Unified installer to avoid this conflict. As your company or employer updates to the new versions, there will be only one app that will exist on the machine. 

For more information on the unified installer, please read this article: https://adobe.ly/4mTkTuz

Best regards,
Tariq | Adobe Community Team | Meet Acrobat Studio