9.0 Standard will not start...

Question

One of my users has a Dell laptop, running Windows 7 Pro (32bit), Office 2010 and has the Adobe Reader X installed. As of two weeks ago, he cannot open anything in 9 standard. Standard will not even run. You can open the task manager, run Adobe 9 and the acrobat.exe process runs for a few seconds and then disappears.
He is still able to print PDF files but when they've finished printing, they open in Reader X.
We've tried uninstalling/reinstalling, deleting registry keys/temp items. Nothing seems to be helping.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

do both keys have sub keys though? There should be quite a few subkeys in the HKCU hive.
The user maybe an Admin, but that doesn't guarantee the Admin has the correct permisisons to these keys. Do check.
The HKCU subkeys get created after first launch and close of Acrobat, so if you've removed Acrobat and re-installed it, i would expect to only see a few at the most under the HKCU hive.
Another possible reason this is happening is a conflicting process is stopping Acrobat from launching.
one quick test,
hold the shift key whilst launching acrobat, does acrobat launch?
You mentioned this started 2 weeks ago, other than installing reader X has anything else changed on this system.
A good way to troubleshoot is to use process monitor to create a log of the event.
the resulting log will show what reg keys and files are being accessed by any running process and if this is successful or not.