Adobe Reader 9.4.6 has taken out my printer drivers

Question

On 12/14/11 I was on my Windows 7 based system when i was sent a pop up window query asking me if I wanted to upgrade to Adobe Reader 9.4.6 I had an earlier version and I get prompts of this nature all the time, so I said yes. Download was protracted, taking 10-15 min. Afterwards I found I could not print documents from any of the other programs I had on that machine, my control panel lists no printers hooked up (like it disabled all the drivers) and attempts to add a driver through the Windows System Wizard just hang up. Any others had this problem? Is this a malware infestation of some kind? The McAfee Security Center software that came with the machine (a recondtioned Dell) hasn't given me any alarms. The program as downloaded takes up 144 MB.

Answer 1

Oddly, it sort of sounds like app behavior under Mac OS X Lion.  Lion has a feature called Resume that puts an app that is launched into the state it was in when it last quit.  So, if certain documents were open when it last quit, those documents would "resume" (re-open automatically) the next time the app is launched.
Now, your profile info says you have a PowerPC iMac running Leopard (and you are posting the "iMac (PPC)" forum), so this should not apply.  But maybe you are running Lion on a newer Mac and your profile info is old.  Or maybe Adobe Reader has been updated to have a restore open documents feature.  In that case, if you accidentally selected all in a folder full of many PDF files and opened them all, and then you quit Reader in that state, that "state" may have been saved for the next time you launched Reader. By closing each document manually, and then quitting Reader, you changed the state when last quit to having no open documents.
If this happens again (in any app), these commands may be useful to know:
There is usually a Close command under the File menu (in the Menu Bar).  If you press the Option key, that command changes to Close All.  So if an app unintentionally opens a very large number of windows (and it is not locked up as a result), you can give the Close All command instead of manually closing each window.
In Lion, if you press (and hold) the Shift key while launching an app, the app launches with a "clean slate" (ignoring the state when it last quit).  I don't know if that would have worked in your case, but it would have been worth a try.  Sorry I did not think of it before; I did not see the possible connection to the Resume feature.