Reader 10.1 update fails, creates huge log files

Question

Last night I saw the little icon in the system tray saying an update to Adobe Reader was ready to be installed.
I clicked it to allow the install.
Things seemed to go OK (on my Windows XP Pro system), although very slowly, and it finally got to copying files.
It seemed to still be doing something and was showing that it was copying file icudt40.dll.  It still displayed the same thing ten minutes later.
I went to bed, and this morning it still showed that it was copying icutdt40.dll.
There is no "Cancel" button, so this morning I had to stop the install through Task Manager.
Now, in my "Local Settings\TEMP" directory, I have a file called AdobeARM.log that is 2,350,686 KB in size and a file MSI38934.LOG that is 4,194,304 KB in size.
They are so big I can't even look at them to see what's in them.  (Too big for Notepad.  When I tried to open the smaller log file, AdobeARM.log, with Wordpad it was taking forever and showing only 1% loaded, so after five minutes, I terminated the Wordpad process so I could actually do something useful with my computer.)
You would think the installer would be smart enough to stop at some point when the log files begin to get enormous.
There doesn't seem to be much point to creating log files that are too big to be read.
The update did manage to remove the Adobe Reader X that was working on my machine, so now I can no longer read PDF files.
Maybe I should go back Adobe Reader 9.
Reader X never worked very well.
Sometimes the menu bar showed up, sometimes it didn't.
PDF files at the physics e-print archive always loaded with page 2 displayed first.  And if you forgot to disable the look-ahead capability, you could get banned from the e-print archive site altogether.
And I liked the user interface for the search function a lot better in version 9 anyway.  Who wants to have to pop up a little box for your search phrase when you want to search?  Searching is about the most important and routine activity one does, other than going from page to page and setting the zoom.

Answer 1

Hi Ankit,
Thank you for your e-mail.
Yesterday afternoon I deleted the > 2 GB AdobeARM.log file and the > 4.194 GB
MSI38934.LOG file.
So I can't upload them.  I expect I would have had a hard time doing so
anyway.
It would be nice if the install program checked the size of the log files
before writing to them and gave up if the size was, say, three times larger
than some maximum expected size.
The install program must have some section that permits infinite retries or
some other way of getting into an endless loop.  So another solution would be
to count the number of retries and terminate after some reasonable number of
attempts.
Something had clearly gone wrong and there was no way to stop it, except by
going into the Task Manager and terminating the process.
If the install program can't terminate when the log files get too big, or if
it can't get out of a loop some other way, there might at least be a "Cancel"
button so the poor user has an obvious way of stopping the process.
As it was, the install program kept on writing to the log files all night
long.
Immediately after deleting the two huge log files, I downloaded and installed
Adobe Reader 10.1 manually.
I was going to turn off Norton 360 during the install and expected there
would be some user input requested between the download and the install, but
there wasn't.
The window showed that the process was going automatically from download to
install. 
When I noticed that it was installing, I did temporarily disable Norton 360
while the install continued.
The manual install went OK.
I don't know if temporarily disabling Norton 360 was what made the difference
or not.
I was happy to see that Reader 10.1 had kept my previous preference settings.
By the way, one of the default settings in "Web Browser Options" can be a
problem.
I think it is the "Allow speculative downloading in the background" setting.
When I upgraded from Reader 9 to Reader 10.0.x in April, I ran into a
problem. 
I routinely read the physics e-prints at arXiv.org (maintained by the Cornell
University Library) and I got banned from the site because "speculative
downloading in the background" was on.
[One gets an "Access denied" HTTP response after being banned.]
I think the default value for "speculative downloading" should be unchecked
and users should be warned that one can lose the ability to access some sites
by turning it on.
I had to figure out why I was automatically banned from arXiv.org, change my
preference setting in Adobe Reader X, go to another machine and find out who
to contact at arXiv.org [I couldn't find out from my machine, since I was
banned], and then exchange e-mails with the site administrator to regain
access to the physics e-print archive.
The arXiv.org site has followed the standard for robot exclusion since 1994
(http://arxiv.org/help/robots), and I certainly didn't intend to violate the
rule against "rapid-fire requests," so it would be nice if the default
settings for Adobe Reader didn't result in an unintentional violation.
Richard Thomas