PDFs Won’t Open with Adobe Acrobat Windows 11

[Brandino Mane]

Hi everyone,

I’m experiencing a frustrating issue on my Windows 11 machine. All of my PDF files, whether on my desktop or elsewhere, will not open when I double-click them to launch Adobe Acrobat. Nothing happens at all — no error message, no loading, nothing.

The strange part is that if I right-click and choose to open the PDF with Chrome or Edge, it opens just fine. But obviously, that’s not ideal.

This problem only started recently. Previously, everything worked perfectly with Adobe Acrobat as my default.

My environment:

• Windows 11 (fully updated)

• Adobe Acrobat (latest version, as far as I know)

• Default program for PDFs is set to Adobe Acrobat

What I’ve tried so far:

• Restarting my computer

• Checking that Adobe Acrobat is still the default for PDFs

• Reinstalling Acrobat

• Running Acrobat as administrator

Still, double-clicking does nothing.

Has anyone else seen this before? Any advice or fixes would be hugely appreciated — it’s really disrupting my workflow.

Thanks in advance!

[creative explorer]

@Brandino Mane a part of me think that you may need to tell the App icon to open the PDFs in Acrobat. Sometimes, the file association in Windows can get a bit corrupted or misdirected, even if the settings panel says it's correct. 

I would re-establish the File Connection via "Open With." This should tell Windows to use Adobe Acrobat for PDF files and to remember that choice.

• Locate any PDF file on your desktop or in a folder.
• Right-click the PDF file. This will bring up the context menu.
• Hover over or click on "Open with."
• Choose "Choose another app": This is crucial. Don't just click "Adobe Acrobat" if it appears directly, as that might be using a cached, broken association.
• In the "How do you want to open .pdf files from now on?" dialog box, scroll down and find "Adobe Acrobat."
• Make sure the box for "Always use this app to open .pdf files" is checked. This is the key step to reinforce the default.
• Click "OK"

The PDF should open in Adobe Acrobat. After performing these steps, try double-clicking other PDF files to see if the issue is resolved.