Grey Screen in IE 11 after newest DC update

Update time:

My company has been working with Adobe tech support directly (via phone calls and screen shares). We think we've identified a fix which will hopefully be pushed out via an Adobe update in the near future. I imagine they have to thoroughly test the update in their testing environment first before they can do a global update so no telling when that'll happen exactly, but know that they are working on it actively (with help from myself and others), and are narrowing down the fix.

For now, I've stated our users are able to work just fine by disabling the Adobe PDF Reader add-on in Internet Explorer, using an alternative browser such as FireFox, or adding the website with the issue to the "Trusted Site" list in Internet Explorer's security settings. Those are just workarounds until a permanent fix can be released.

Hello ???... anyone on board ?

We have numerous employees with the same problem, so far what we narrow employees still with Windows 7 are OK, but those with 8.1 and 10 having intermittent issue with the PDF opening.

This is going on for a week now.

Any solution so far from Adobe ?

Rock

I'm not sure if this is pertinent or helpful, but I wanted to pass it along...

Several of our folks, but not all, are having this same problem.  The only difference I have found so far is the O/S.  32-bit versions of Win7 appear to be impacted, but 64-bit versions are not.  (Just a theory at this point.)

We have confirmed that the key to this issue is found in Preferences > Page Display > Show Large Images.

We have a web app that has many PDF files our users open.  If the Show Large Images is checked, they do not have a problem.  If it is not checked, certain PDFs do not display.  I say certain because the ones that do open are small PDF files (<50k).  The PDFs that do not are larger (>400K).  We have yet to determine where Adobe has set the cutoff point.  I'd like to know what their reasoning for this feature is.

I am not sure that its been mentioned in this thread before but in my office we noticed that it may be related to a windows update (at least for W10) that happened on or around the same day that the DC update dropped. KB3194798 dropped around the 11th and all machines in the office that has both the Adobe and Microsoft updates seem to be affected. One system that only has the adobe but not the microsoft patch has not encountered the problem. maybe that will help to reproduce at least for windows 10 cant speak for w7.

Also as far as replicating we were able to replicate using local pdf's on our machine. Save the file open IE11 go to file -> open -> all files find PDF and open it a couple times and for us eventually it doesnt open and provides the grey screen no website necessary.

Has anyone tried the following: Edit>Preferences>Page Display>Page Content and Information>Show large images [must be checked]? This happened with me both in Reader and Acrobat XI. Checking the box corrected the problem.

Downgrading to 11 helped me resolve the issue. I noticed that on affected machines windows is never releasing the adobe tasks after generating a pdf. When we run a pdf 2 tasks show up and even after closing the IE window those tasks stick around. On non-affected and reverted machines once you close the report window those tasks are ended. Not sure if this has something to do with it or not.

This is happening to us as well.

We discovered that disabling protected mode fixes it, so we disabled "Enable protected mode at startup" for everyone with the issue.

That fixed the issue for the remainder of the day yesterday, but today, everyone that we disabled this option for all have the option re-enabled and the grey screen is back.

To test, we unchecked "Enable protected mode at startup" and then reboot a PC, it re-enabled "Enable protected mode at startup" on its own.

The bottom line is that we can fix this in the moment with an undesirable and insecure workaround, but even that is temporary until the next reboot. We are available for anyone that would like our assistance in troubleshooting/reproducing, but I will also email the addresses offered already in this thread.

Thanks,

Josh

EDIT: We are attempting the trusted site fix now.

We are also noticing this issue on about 100 computers at my office. We have found that clearing IE cache along with closing and opening IE temporarily (random amount of times until it fails again) allows us to open PDF's. We are all IE11 on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit machines. We are not noticing the issue on any Windows 10 machines yet.