Another way Acrobat Pro X startup fails can be fixed - informational

Question

I'd like to recount an experience here, which had the same symptoms as the long run of Adobe Activation system errors. The odd process to recover from those is still needed, but the cause of the initial failure here turns out to not be Adobe's fault. Rather, Microsoft's, I think.
The Symptom: you try to run Acrobat. It fails to show any screen, and the activity cursor soon dies away. If you watch via the Windows task manager, you can see a flicker, but then it's gone. No amount of reinstalling, etc. will fix this. I had this happen to the Acrobat Pro X which is part of CS6.
The Solution: I had tried everything in the forum, especially the responses suggesting the problem was with Activation. However, that was not it this time. The problem was that I had a fresh version of Microsoft's anti-malware EMET program running, EMET 5.1. Acrobat was listed under protected applications, and with nearly every type of protection checked. Here's how I recovered:
- first, of course, I clicked the master item to remove all checked protections from Acrobat Pro X.
- Now Acrobat would start, not fail silently, but it gave me a mysterious Error 6 and insisted that I reinstall before it would work.
- I uninstalled, and then ran the CS6 installer. It refused to accept my serial number when I typed it in, though this had not happened before. Solution: if the CS installer offers you a serial number with the last block blanked with XXXX, accept that. If you do, the installer will run. If you try to replace it, the installer will say it can't authenticate the serial number.
- running the installer fresh and accepting the number it filled in even with the XXXX, the installer ran, installing the original version of Acrobat.
- Probably at this stage you will need to reactivate Acrobat. You do this by the procedure which shows many times in the forum:
= start another CS6 program, such as Photoshop, and Deactivate from the Help menu. Now all of CS6 is deactivated.
= close the CS6 program, and then open again. Accept when it attempts to register via your Adobe ID. Now the suite is running in trial mode.
= close the CS6 program again, and open it again. Soon after it opens you will get the opportunity to activate. Choose to do so using a serial number, and then enter your number.
= Close the CS6 program, then open it once again, closing once again after it's open. These steps activate the suite, and thus your  re-added Acrobat.
- Now Acrobat will run, and will open a  PDF.
- I then installed the latest update manually, having downloaded it. This brought Acrobat to the current version 10.1.13, and tests showed all well.
Glad to feel it's solid again, Acrobat. I haven't gone back to EMET to see what protections it can accept, saving that for another day, since EMET is a useful program for web safety.

Answer 1

Ok, I had a chance to test EMET 5.1 vs. Acrobat Pro X crashing.
- deinstalling EMET 5.1 returned Acrobat to working properly, no crashing
- re-installing EMET 5.1 and accepting the recommended configuration did indeed include both Acrobat and Acrobat Reader configuration, using almost all of EMET's abilities. So Microsoft did it, not me.
- once again, Acrobat Pro X crashed, not always at startup, but soon enough in viewing pdfs.
- Acrobat Reader XI (11), however, has no evident problem with its similar EMET configuration. Reader is already supposed to be more secure than Acrobat, and EMET can only increase this safety, so that  it is good to use as default reader within Chrome, for example.
- Also I should mention that I didn't discover this problem until much later than the EMET installation, because Distiller creating PDFs as a Windows Print job from browsers etc. had no crashing problems. This is possibly because EMET actually isn't configured for that  part of Acrobat.
- Now, I tried the beginnings of a boolean search on EMET config for Acrobat itself. It didn't take long to discover that the problem EMET facility is SEHOP: Structured Exception Handler Overwrite Protection. This is one of the extra layerings available to try to prevent hackers from exploiting the app state on the way to a crash they deliberately cause. I seem to remember it being a particular problem in compatibility for older programs, and indeed I found some Google evidence it can interfere with Flash also if you run it on Chrome.
- Then, simply unchecking the SEHOP box on the default EMET configuration for Acrobat, and saving that configuration appears to solve the problems with Acrobat Pro X. You'll then have all the boxes checked except SEHOP and ASR on the end, which was  already unchecked. A lot of apps don't apparently support ASR.
- Since Reader 11 works with SEHOP, and since Microsoft included it in the standard configuration, I have the idea that Acrobat Pro XI (11) is likely to work without removing SEHOP from the configuration. This method will save you the $200 upgrade until you have reason to need it.
Hope this is complete enough and straightforward enough as a case now, so that it should help anyone running into Acrobat not starting, or unexplained crashing of Acrobat, after they've installed Microsoft's safety package EMET.