PDF Printer and Acrobat fail to open or run or anything else.

Question

Hi
Adobe Acrobat Standard 9 has been installed on this TS2008 (VM) server for over a year without problem until recently.
To start, the Adobe PDF printer stopped creating PDFs. When it worked a user would print and the PDF (creation) progress bar dialog box would open and the Adobe Distiller icon would appear in the taskbar (swirling) and a PDF would be created. Now we get the progress bar but no Distiller icon and no PDF is created.
Then Adobe Acrobat Standard (editor) failed to open any PDFs. We installed Adobe Acrobat 9 reader which opened PDFs for a while and now that has stopped working.
After many uninstalls, reinstalls, reg cleans we decided to open a case with Adobe who told us that Acrobat 9 is not supported on Server2008. The customer purchased Adobe Acrobat X.
We installed Acrobat X (in terminal server mode) and all was well for around 24hrs and then it all stopped working again.
I have since uninstalled reinstalled again. I created 1 PDF and after that the progress bar just hangs. We performed a controlled user logon to the server and all was going well until one user logged in and he isnt able to open Acrobat to read or edit PDFs.
There are no events logs which appear to directly relate to this. We were concerned about a HpBIDI driver which no longer errors but we do have a large amount of EventID 7036, ServerControl Manager Eventlog provider and EventID 4 SpoolerWin32SPL.
We have since been back to Adobe Support who advised us to unplug the network cable which we cannot do as its a hosted VM (with no access to the the VM console). He then asked us to remove the server from the Domain which we can't do as this is a single live server. They intend to come back to me!
We are really at a loss here for idea's, can anyone please provide some clues?
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi billu54860732,
Try running the Repair command from under the Help menu to see if it corrects the problem.
The probable cause of the error is, multiple processes of Acrobat/Reader running in the background.
If 'Repair' doesn't resolve the issue kindly follow the steps mentioned below and check, if it helps.
1) Press CTRL+ALT+DEL together
2) Go to the Task Manager
3) Go to Processes in the Task Manager and kill al the processes related to Acrobat/Reader.
4) Launch Reader/Acrobat (It should launch without an error).
To further isolate the issue you might want to run Acrobat/Reader in an environment where no other services are running.
This can be achieved via "MSCONFIG"
1) Click on start type run
2) Type MSCONFIG in the run prompt
3) Go to services and click on hide all Microsoft services
4) Click disable all
5) Go to the startup in configuration window and disable all startup items
6) Restart your system
7) Launch Acrobat/Reader
If, it is launched without an error, a service on your system is conflicting with Acrobat/Reader.
Let me know if issue persist.
Regards,
Aadesh