Dull, muted colors when creating PDF

As a signmaker I regularly create PDF files from my signmaking program (FlexiSign) to email to clients for approval. Sometimes it works perfectly and at other times the colors come out totally dull and muted so that there is little similarity to what the finished product will look like.
I've tried a number of different things to correct this. Have even created eps files to open in Illustrator and then create a pdf but it still comes out differently.
I downloaded a trial version of PDF Converter Professional by Nuance Corporation to try it out. The colors work perfectly every time with that program but I don't want to buy it since I already own Adobe Acrobat Professional.
I would imagine there are some settings I need to change to make things mesh but I'm not sure where to begin. Any thoughts?
Operating system: Windows XP
Acrobat Version: 6.0 Professional

OK, George.
Your comment about Pantone vs RGB, as well as the discussion you provided a link to caused me to try to understand color management. I went over to Lynda.com and went through part of one of the courses there and also looked in the Help documentation in my design program.
I am relatively uninformed about color management and just kind of try to go with what the program gives me but I see how critical it is. I tried some settings in my design program, which were pretty unsatisfactory. However, what I did find was that if I take the Pantone colors and convert them to RGB before I create the PDF in Acrobat, the colors stay very satisfactorily true to what is seen in the original file. (Again, my aim is to let the client view a reasonable simulation.) I will continue to experiment and see if there is an overall setting I can use rather than doing the manual conversion, but at least you helped me to identify the culprit - namely the inconsistency of the color settings between the 2 programs and the need to use RGB.
Thank you!
P.S. One caveat - You say that if I wanted to use Spot Colors it should print fine (even though it doesn't display correctly.) I doubt if this is true because I believe in the conversion process it maintained the values for CMYK and assigned those as values for RGB, which explains why it turned out so dull in the PDF display.

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Dull, muted colors when creating PDF

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