Adobe Reader DC keeps updating itself to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC!!!

[whydoyoukeepupgrading]

We use Adobe Reader on our terminal servers and it had been working perfectly fine up until recently.

For the last couple of months Adobe Reader has decided to automatically upgrade itself to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC every once in a while, asking all currently logged in users to sign into Adobe Reader with their Adobe ID, which they don't have because our company doesn't have any Acrobat Pro licenses. This will sometimes happen once in two weeks, or twice in two days! It seems sporadic and happens on all of the server in the farm.

As soon as I receive a report that Adobe is asking a user to sign in, I check the Application log in Event Viewer on that server for event 11707 and lo and behold, there's an event in there from a few minutes ago saying something like:

"Product: Adobe Acrobat DC (64-bit) -- Installation operation completed successfully."

To fix this, I've had to uninstall Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and install Adobe Reader from https://get.adobe.com/reader while the server is running and users are logged in, which makes the users understandably annoyed as they've been kicked off all of their PDFs for the 5th time in a month!

This week I got fed up and looked into other ways to install Adobe Reader and found you can sign up for an Adobe Reader distribution license and obtain an installer from a separate link. I installed this verison of the app (which is sadly 32-bit but doesn't make much of a difference in our environment) and things have been stable for the past three days and I'm hoping it'll remain that way...

Any idea why Adobe might have kept updating itself completely unprompted?

The only thing I can think of is that a user tried clicking the Edit PDF button and signed up for a free Acrobat Pro trial, but that requires a valid credit card but I can't imagine they signed up for that many trials...

Or maybe that particular user had an Adobe account with an expired Acrobat Pro trial and when they signed in after clicking Edit PDF, it upgraded the whole app to Acrobat Pro DC for all users? Isn't is supposed to ask users for an admin password before updating an app for all users on the server?

I'm keen to put this one to rest because it's been driving me mad.

[GRANT23637609i894]

Adobe are forcing 64 bit. You can't avoid that. And they now have a single installer. No more seperate Reader and Pro.

If you want 32 bit you can only delay the inevitable.

Temporary work around is to stop the Adobe Update Service from running. Change the login credentials of the service to bogus. So it can't start.

Then your Adobe won't update.

While your "fixed" you need to work on a solution to your 32 bit reliance. Software programmers now realise 32 bit days are gone.

For security and compliance bring your dependant software up to date. 64 bit.

[bigwexi]

Cited link to Apply for a desktop license does not work (403 error).
Our Assoc office is using a number of Acrobat DC and PRO subscriptions.
We would like our users to download the Reader from our web site rather than them accidently downloading the paid for version and getting angry at us.

Thanks, Enoch.