How do I get the Converting to Adobe PDF process to stop hanging?

Question

I installed Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional on a machine running Windows 7 Professional 64bit.  I have tried creating PDFs from MS Office files (using the Acrobat PDFMaker toolbar).  I have also tried printing to Adobe PDF, from within MS office but also elsewhere (e.g. IE, Notepad).  No matter the creation method, I am prompted for a file name and location and then the Acrobat PDFMaker window appears with a taskbar and message "Coverting to Adobe PDF..."  The process hangs there and a print job appears in the Adobe PDF printer with a status of "Error - Printing."  How do I get the process to stop hanging and successfully create PDFs?

Answer 1

FWIW, a former colleague was also frustrated with this "Error - Printing" hang-up problem, when printing from any app to Adobe PDF, with Acrobat Pro 9.3.0 on a Win7x64 system. I recall forum threads on that issue, with no clear resolution?. What did work on every print job, though, was the two-step method: (a) Print to File with Adobe PDF, then (b) fire up Acrobat Distiller 9 to convert the intermediate .prn Postscript file. (It would seem that Acrotray wasn't functioning properly in a x64 environment?...though it did run as one of the pc startup processes)
As that two-step method was acceptable for his workflow, he never explored the possibility of getting a fluent one-step PDF creation by upgrading to the highest available v9x version, or beyond.