SERIOUS ADOBE ACROBAT PROFESSIONAL 8 ERROR

The same thing happened to me (serious error etc) but I was able to fix it... Hopefully this info will help someone at Adobe reproduce this:

I had a standalone (single-user) edition of Adobe Acrobat Pro 8.0 installed on my computer that was working fine (running Windows XP Pro SP2). I had previous editions of Acrobat 7 and Adobe CS2 Production uninstalled (but noteably each had left some directory folders that were largely empty). When I installed Adobe CS3 Web edition yesterday, I chose to allow it to install/upgrade the AdobeAcrobatPro component. I did not uninstall the previous standalone Acrobat Pro. The installation went through fine and all CS3 programs/components seem to work fine, except for Acrobat Pro 8 (which the Web Edition had upgraded to 8.1), which kept giving the 'serious error' and 'memory access' errors about 5-10seconds after Acrobat would load. Uninstalling and reinstalling Acrobat Pro failed.

Like some previous posters, I followed the steps mentioned in posts 136 and 139 above... more specifically I uninstalled all Adobe components as well as Macromedia components, found all file/folder structures with Adobe, Macromedia, or Flexnet in it and deleted them all. I took the extra step of going into my registry, backing it up, and then going through and deleting references to Adobe components (in particular registry items related to installation/uninstallation). Did a clean reboot, verified that my computer was still booting ok despite the massive registry cleanup.

I then installed my original Acrobat 8.0 Pro standalone product. Went without a hitch and worked fine. I then installed CS3 Web edition over it, this time UNCHECKING the Acrobat component so that it wouldn't update that. So far so good - all programs including Acrobat 8.0 work fine with no errors.

Wasted several hours, but it's all done... hope this will work for some of you other there, although afte r reading through 178 posts it appears that there are multiple problems causing the 'serious error' to occur, either due to an Adobe upgrade or Windows upgrade component, and that Adobe needs to just come out with either a patch for its activation/Flex validation component, or come out with a patch that will cleanly uninstall affected components and allow the user to do a clean reinstall...

- James

Re: Helmut's appeal to Adobe--message #165 (just in case they might monitor their forums), here is a way to get the attention of their CEO.

I posted a consumer action in message #83 that provides the name and phone number of Adobe's CEO and a suggested action.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Have at it.

S.E.

Hey Marc, I also disabled DEP on my installation of 32-bit Vista Ultimate, and I am able to use all the features of Acrobat 8.1 without any problems. Thank you for that workaround.

I have all the 8/17/07 Vista updates installed. They didn't make any difference - I still have the same problems. I went back to disabling DEP.

Is anyone able to confirm that the latest Windows Updates have fixed the issue? Microsoft recently released two important stability updates for Windows Vista, did those help anyone fix the issue?

Marc - remember it isn't a Vista issue! It is a version 8 issue. We experience similar issues with XP machines.

Vista did a bunch of updates three days ago. Since those updates Acrobat has been behaving as it should be. It is just as it should be without any issues in the slightest. I will let you know if it keeps working or gets angry again.

Running Vista Premium and struggling with the same problems discussed above. I chose to disable DEP completely and can now print from Acrobat 8.1 Pro without problems.

See http://www.realtime-vista.com/administration/2007/04/disabling_data_execution_preve.htm for a full discussion of how to do it and other considerations.

Of course, my preference would be for ADOBE to fix this so I don't have to compromise the entire system just to run their product. That said, I wish I had never gone to Vista !!

On my VM, UAC was enabled, I was not running the install with any special admin privileges (other than what accepting the UAC prompt) and the software was just running as a normal user. Technically, the account I was using is an "Administrator", but in Vista they're still required to conform to UAC as long as it's turned on, so things wouldn't be any different for a "standard" level user. This was Vista Ultimate...but as I said before, I also have this running successfully on my laptop running Vista Business.

I haven't started the Windows Updates yet, but I will do so in the next day or so. I'll let everyone know what turns up.

Matthew, that is great news.

It almost HAS to be a Windows update. I read the post, above, regarding XP, but I do have 8.1 working fine on a fully-updated XP Pro machine, so that confuses me. I would be VERY interested to know which update causes Acrobat to quit. If none of the upgrades cause Acrobat to quit, then I will really be at wit's end (since I am SURE that I did not load any new software in the relevant time period of the original problem--wasn't using the laptop then--nor when I made a clean VIsta installation).

My short term solution was to put version 7 back on the laptop--does everything except print to PDF (for which I am using deskPDF or Nuance's trialware, at the moment).

On your virtual setup, is User Access Control on or off? Did you "Run as Administrator" when you installed or just run as a user with administrator privileges? Are you using Vista Ultimate, Business, Home???