Adobe Reader prints incorrectly, OSX Preview prints correctly?!

I was wondering if anyone could help us out with some insights into a problem which occurred recently when printing some large, combined PDFs, some of which ran to several hundreds of pages in length.
The PDFs were combined from three main sources:
PDFs we’d produced ourselves from InDesign 5.5 to “Pass4Press” / PDF 1.4 specifications.
PDFs saved from Microsoft Word 2010 using the “Save as PDF” command.
PDFs supplied by the client - I suspect these were produced either from Microsoft Word or via the “Save as PDF” command on a printer/scanner.
We used an up-to-date postscript driver and printed to something like a Canon 7100 printer using Adobe/Acrobat Reader. The stuff we printed from InDesign was fine (as I expected it to be, this is the spec I send my PDFs to commercial printers with and I’ve never had a problem with it). Sometimes the text from the Word-generated ones would print as a series of boxes and other times the same file would print correctly with no problems (the font used was either Arial or Arial Narrow), whilst the ones from the client would always print incorrectly in places as a series of symbols. I don’t know what font they used (or how it was embedded) but it looked like Arial and the files came from France (we were printing in England) so maybe their font glyphs are different?
Opening up a couple of the files in Illustrator revealed no problems with the font. We could print from Adobe Reader using a slower, rasterized driver (which was sooooooo slow we would have missed the deadline) but the funny thing was if we opened the same files using Mac OSX 10.6’s “Preview” programme and printed via the wickedly-fast postscript driver, everything came out perfectly!
I know that I haven’t provided much in the way of specific, detailed information but would anyone have a general idea of what was going on? I suspect that it was something to do with the fonts not being embedded properly and Preview being more tolerant of this issue than Reader? That said, Adobe Reader is meant to be the blue-ribband application for PDF viewing and printing so presumably it should be more versatile than a scaled-down imitation product which comes free with every Mac? Would anyone be able to suggest a way of heading this off at the pass in the future? Please bear in mind that some of the files were supplied to us by our client, an engineering firm who would see supplying correctly-formatted PDFs as a non-issue, they just hand over whatever comes out of the machine, so ensuring that the PDFs have been encoded correctly at source is not really an option that’s open to us in this case.
As always, thanks in advance for any and all advice offered.

Just as a further note to this, something along similar lines has just happened.
A work collegue printed the PDF located at:
http://marketforce.eu.com/Conferences/nuclearnewbuild12/Brochure/
The text printed largely as a series of "y"s and full stops (periods). I printed the same file to a different machine (same make and model) from both Preview on the Mac and Reader 8 on a Windows XP PC and the result was perfect both times!
Would anyone have any general tips on how to troubleshoot PDFs so we can spot in advance if things like this might happen and also can anyone shed any light on if these kind of problems can sometimes be caused by a printer and/or its driver rather than the PDF itself? I looked at the Preflight options in Acrobat for the first time ever this morning and the range of options contained within seemed a little overwhelming for a newcomer.
Cheers,
NA

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