acrodist.exe starting on its own and continuously hogging 1 cpu core

[Guest]

In our enterprise environment we have noticed on multiple machines acrodist.exe (Acrobat Distiller) is randomly maxing out 1 CPU core. So on dual-core machine there is 50% utilisation, quad-core 25% utilisation, octa-core 12.5% cpu utilisation.

This is even when the end-user is not using any Acrobat or PDF related applications. Upon investigation using Process Explorer we have noticed approx. 10 minutes after first bootup, for some reason acrotray.exe calls Distiller (acrodist.exe) under the users context using the following command line:

acrodist /N /P --UseSystemFonts /Q:15

The acrodist.exe process then proceeds to run indefinitely maxing out 1 CPU core until it is manually terminated from task manager.

Using help files I know what the switch parameters /N (new instance of Distiller) and /Q:15 (quit after 15 seconds of completion) do but I cant figure out what /P --UseSystemFonts is asking Distiller to do. Anyone got any ideas? Our theory is that is getting stuck trying to process a font but no idea which one. Any help would be much appreciated.

We've tried to analyse the process threads using Process Explorer and Process Monitor but have not been able to get anything useful of what acrodist.exe is actually doing or what it's stuck on.

Confirmed this problem exists on at least 140 of our Win7 SP1 (32 and 64-bit) machines with Acrobat XI (v11), both Standard and Pro versions affected

[Guest]

We've installed Acrobat Standard 11 on a clean standalone non-domain Win 8.1 PC and what we've come to notice is that the appearance of acrodist.exe almost exactly 10 mins after acrotray.exe launches seems to be normal behavior albeit it should only use 5-10% CPU for approx 5 second then terminate itself after 15 seconds (/Q:15).

However, in our Win7 domain enterprise computers acrodist appears 10 mins after acrotray and never disappears constantly throttling 1 cpu core. After some more digging we've noticed it doesn't effect ALL machines with Acrobat 11 installed, i'd estimate approx 60% seem to be affected. I believe it may be something cached into the users profiles that's causing the problem because if other users log on to these problem boxes the problem doesn't manifest, acrodist quickly appears and disappears. But before we start resetting using profiles we would like to understand whats is actually going on here with acrodist.exe and constant 1 CPU core utilisation.

[Guest · Accepted solution]

We have determined when acrodist.exe is chugging away it is trying to read the path defined in (Default) string under:

HKCU\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Distiller\AdobePDFSettings\

this string contains the following local path:

C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Adobe PDF\Settings

but for some reason it is failing to read the C:\ProgramData\... path. In our environment it was because of our 3rd party user profile virtualisation solution called AppSense Environment Manager. Stopping AppSense EM from managing acrodist.exe personalisation has seemingly resolved the issue.

Furthermore, I just wanted to add, this only affected users who had launched Acrobat Distiller from the Start Menu at least once previously, this action added the registry location into their profile that AppSense EM was failing to read. If they have never launched the Distiller tool then they wont have a problem even if they use Acrobat everyday. Most users we found will only go into Acrobat, only the more advanced power users will open Distiller, so this is why it didn't affect all computers.