Adobe Reader wants to open everything

[boweasel]

A friend had me look at her Vista PC.  She had about 20 icons on her desktop, and about 16 of them had the familiar Adobe Reader icon, instead of their normal icons.  Whenever one of those icons would be selected we would get a message that Adobe reader could not open the file,  Almost anything we selected brought up that message -   Interner Explorer, msconfig, Windows Explorer, System Restore, MS Word, AVG  to name a few of the many.  I even went to Start/Run and entered  the path for rstrui.exe, and got the same result.

Task manager DID work, and every time we would get one of those messages, we could see that Acrord32.exe was running.  We could kill that process, but it would just pop up next time we tried to open almost anything.

I ultimately uninstalled all Adobe products from her PC, and everything went back to working normally.  However, she's a school teacher and need Adobe reader for her job, so the next day I went back to her place, went to Adobe's site and downloaded the newest version of Adobe Reader.

All her icons reverted back to the Adobe Reader picture and we, once again, could not open anything.  So I again uninstalled the reader, saw that the icons were correct, and that everyhing worked as it should.

How do I fix this so she can have Adobe Reader back on her PC?  

[integral_D]

Hi,

I just posted a query on this forum for the exact same problem, then found your post.   Did you ever solve the problem?  If you did, I'd love to hear about it.   Thanks,

David

[boweasel]

David

I'm trying to rememer exactly what I did to get rid of the problem....

I believe I went into Windows Explorer, Tools, and File Types, looked for exe in the list. If there, delete it. Then choose new, type in exe, click advanced, then choose application.

I THINK that was all I did....

Scott

[370H55V]

In Vista you can do this from the Control Panel under Set Program Access and Defaults.

It will open a Window where you can choose from ALL file types currently on the HD and then you can set the default program for them.

This is a sporadic thing in Windows where upon occasion, the latest application installed is suddenly set as the default application for EVERYTHING. Windows does it, not the app itself, because it happens with ALL kinds of software.

I've never been able to find a good, workable solution for it.

[integral_D]

Hi,

Thanks to Scott and Nothing at All for your replies.   I have Windows 7, but it should still work.  I haven't re-installed Adobe Reader yet, but Nothing at All's comment about this being a Windows issue is helpful.   So I'll work on this soon.   Thanks,

David

[Guest]

Hi, I have the same problem as boweasel and Integral D, and i'm trying to look for a solution.

Did you two managed to solve the problem? And how?

Thank you,

Loïc

[john_shockey]

Happened to me this morning running Windows 7. Reader wasn't open

ning PDF's as a default. I went to properties clicked some button and now all my icons are PDF icons and Word tries to open in Reader. Help.