Can't restore 9.5, can't uninstall, stuck in limbo!

Question

I should have known better. I had acrobat 9.5.2 installed, and was perfectly happy with it. I could view PDF docs, and scan from my scanner directly to a PDF document. Then after weeks of the updater reminding me, I finally let X1 install. Much to my dissapointment I could no longer scan directly to PDF fioles from my scanner. So all I wanted to do was "go back", and this is where the trouble started. My machine is Win-XP pro SR3. I used a windows restrore point to go back to the day before my X1 upgrade. After doing that, acrobat 9.5x seemed to work again, and I could now scan to PDF again from my scanner. I thought I was done. But then, after viewing a document in acfrobat, I realized that a lot of features wouldn't work, and I'd keep getting complaints about plugins missing. So next, I downloaded the full install for Acrobat 9.5.2 from adobe and tried to install from scratch. It would get tp about 96% complete, and then fail with a box saying "the product is already installed". So next i went to the windows control panel and tried to remove acrobat, figuring it would install better if it was first completely removed. But the uninstall failed. Upon attempting to eremove acrobat (listed as adobe reader 9.5.2), an alert comes up saying "The patch package cannot be opened". So now I'm stuck in limbo, and I'll probably need some expert help to manually remove the product from my system, or find a way to fix it. Naturally when I got on the adobe chat line, I was basically told they wouldn't support anything but the latest product.

Answer 1

Well thanks. Good to know its a registry cleaner, because cleaning up all remnants of an applications registry entries by hand is very tedious. But a registry cleaner is not a full uninstall, right? And for now, as i said, I did manage to fix my 9.5.2 installation.
As far as the the versions and names, I've probably added to the confsion here, but in my defense let me explain that if you give me a product and call it "X", and after some upgrade it becomes known as "Y", you can see where a customer like me would be challenged to not think of them the same thing. And this time a programmer may have missed an instance of the name "acrobat" when the code base was borrowed. You see, it is indeed Adobe Reader 9.5.2 when you pull down the "help->about" menu. But, I also have an all-in-one Lexmark printer that has scanning capability, and when you use it, it downloads a list of available applications from the target computer that can accept the raw scan data. ACROBAT READER was one of them, and thats what "Adobe Reader" broadcasts to the scanners as an available scan application. This is what I've always used to scan documents and convery them to a PDF file.
So... when I first upgraded to Adobe Reader X1, I lost my ability to scan to "Acrobat Reader" after it deleted files related to "Adobe Reader 9.5.2". And just FYI, it was NOT replaced by a new Adobe Reader scan application, so I lost my ability to "scan to PDF". When I subsequently backed out X1, and restored (and subsequently repaired) Adobe Reader 9.5.2, everything worked fine again, including the ACROBAT Reader option broadcast to my scanner (printer). So just to be clear, it is Abobe Reader 9.5, (and several versions prior incidentally ) that has carried over the word "acrobat", by sending this name as a potential scan application target to my scanner.
I'll be happy to provide you any other particulars you might want, if it might help others in product support. But as for my current issue and situation, the problem was solved, even if by a round about way. Now I certainly would try completely uninstalling it and re-installing from scratch when I have time and have a clone ready to reverse whatever happens if it doesn't work out. But the fact is I still can't! The add/remove programs operation in my control panel still says that "patch package" is missing when I try to do an "uninstall" or "change", and you've just told me that the cleaner will only clean the registry. So it seems I have a situation where at this point, my adobe reader 9.5.2 works, and the only thing I can't do is uninstall it. Remember I mentioned that the X1 install attempt merilly deleted tons of files, and I geuss one of them was the uninstall script.