Adobe Reader – Preview in Windows Explorer – Roaming Profiles

Question

First sorry for my English, my mother tongue Swiss-German
We are running a Citrix server farm on Windows Server 2008R2 SP1. Recently, the request has arisen to view PDF documents in the preview pane of Windows Explorer. Unfortunately I always get the following error message "Adobe Reader - An internal error occurred"
Now I can just start the application “Adobe Reader”, close the application and now the preview works as long as the Citrix session persists. After a logoff / logon the problem occurs again.
The following analyses have been made:
The problem occurs also without Citrix XenApp
The problem has nothing to do either with user rights or GPO. I got the same behaviour when the User has administrator rights, disabled UAC and without any GPO
The problem only occurs when roaming profile are enabled. When the user has a local profile, the problem disappears, although also in this case Adobe Reader must be started once, so that preview in Explorer works
With Windows System State Analyzer Tool I could see, that just a simple start of the application Adobe Reader creates a lot files in the folder c:\Users\%Username%\Local\Adobe. This part of the profiles are lost in roaming profile after logoff.
There is no folder redirection, as I have seen in some discussions in this forum.
Is there a solution for this problem, perhaps a special setting in “Adobe Customization Wizard” or somewhere else?
Thanks for feedback

Answer 1

The reason you are getting the error is that the prevhost.exe process that is being invoked in the preview pane looks for a folder in the user's local profile, AppData\Local\Adobe\Acrobat\11.0 (or whatever version). We're creating that folder for user's at logon, which solves the issue with the error.