Acrobat Reader DC does not open but 2 instances of the process are created

[Samoreen]

Hi,

[Running Windows 10 Pro 1803 build 17134.376]

Since a few days (probably after the last Windows cumulative update KB4462933), Acrobat Reader DC is no longer working. When I double-click its icon or a PDF file, the sand hourglass cursor appears for a few seconds and that's it. No error message, no main window appearing, no pdf file opening. However, 2 instances of the acrord32.exe process are created, even if I double-click only once.

During each attempt, new COMRuntime errors are listed in the Event Viewer :

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local access permission to the COM Server application c:\windows\system32\svchost.exe with APPID

Unavailable

to the user yyyy\xxxx SID (S-1-5-21-3830724593-899982153-72885144-1000) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC) running in the application container Unavailable SID (Unavailable). The application set this security permission programmatically; to modify this security permission contact the application vendor.

So it's obviously a permission problem. Which one ?

I have tried multiple times to uninstall/re-install, to run it as an administrator, in Win7/8 compatibility mode, also tried the various "fixes" that can be found on the web, including the eula.exe fix, disabling antivirus, resetting the preferences... Nothing helps.

So the program is now totally unusable. It seems that I'm not alone with this issue.

Any other fix that would work ?

Thanks in advance.

[Samoreen]

OK. Now looking for a competitor.

[Samoreen]

Now using Foxit. No problem.

[Test Screen Name]

It may be irrelevant for you now, but I wonder if the app ended up off screen somehow. Something to try in such cases is Alt+space bar (same time). An visible-but-off-screen window should pop up a menu at the edge, top or bottom of the screen, You can then choose Move and use keyboard arrows to drag it back.

[Samoreen]

Good idea. I should have tested whether a window was actually created. I'll try to re-install and let you know.

[Samoreen]

Hi again,

You won't believe me. After installing the Foxit reader, I manually cleaned up the registry and deleted all the items related to Acrobat Reader because there were many leftovers there after the de-installation of Acrobat Reader. Then I re-launched the installer in order to test your suggestion. And this time, Acrobat Reader opened normally.

So thank you for your suggestion which invited me to test again.

[Test Screen Name]

I guess if it actually were window position, that this is stored in the registry too. Thanks for the feedback, we do see this issue now and again and this was a new idea for fixing it, I'll wait and see if we get more similar problems.

[Samoreen]

By the way, please note that I still have these COMRuntime errors mentioned above whenever I launch Acrobat Reader. I'm a former developer and DCOM specialist, so I tried to fix the permission errors manually with DCOMCnfg but as the message says :

The application set this security permission programmatically; to modify this security permission contact the application vendor.

So whatever I can modify is reset by the program itself. These errors apparently don't prevent Acrobat Reader from functioning correctly but I'm wondering why they appear in the first place.