Unable to open document. Please check to see if you have read permission for the above file.

Question

System:
Adobe Acrobat X Pro, 10.1.2
Windows 7 Enterprise, 32-bit
Quad Core badass CPU
4GB RAM
MS Word 2010 (Office 2010)
I installed the latest version as Administrator and am running as Administrator. I have all rights to all files on the PC.
When I attempt to create a PDF from any Word document, whether .DOC or .DOCX, I get an error window every time:
"Unable to open document:"
"[document location]"
"Please check to see if you have read permission for the above file."
This happens after the little notice pops up "Starting the application which created the document...."
If I open Word and create PDF from the ribbon, it works. It still won't allow me to create from Acrobat.
It creates PDFs from Excel files but not DOC files. I've searched for solutions but found none. I did find this from July of 2011:
"I have found out from Adobe technical support that this is a known issue with Office 2010 SP1 installed. This is an FYI for anyone else experiencing this issue, remove SP1 and it will work ok. They said an update to correct this issue will be coming within the next quarter."
I have updated to the latest version 10.1.2 and still have this problem.
This is a major issue, because it also fails on batch conversions, which is what I really need for the 100 or so documents that need to be PDFed. I'm not going to open each individual file and save each one from within Word.
This is a KNOWN ISSUE at Adobe, and if you look through the forums you'll find many people having this problem, and so far, I have not seen any solution.
If anyone has found the solution, please post it here.
Thanks!
B

Answer 1

I think I found a solution. It seems to be relatet to normal.dotm.
In our environment we have upgraded from XP & Office 2003 to Win7 and Office 2010. Normal.dot is stored on the users home share. When Office 2010 is started for the first time (for a user) it takes some of the old stuff from normal.dot and puts it in the new normal.dotm. When this happens, we get this error in Acrobat X.
The solution is to rename both normal.dot and notmal.dot to e.g. normal.dot.old and normal.dotm.old. Office/Word 2010 will then create a new, "clean" normal.dotm.
(By the way, if you are in a corporate environment, you might have changed the default path to normal.dot in Office group policies. You can see it here: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\office\14.0\common\general\usertemplates)
I would be interested in knowing exactly why/what in normal.dotm caused this error. I can provide you (Adobe) with a faulty normal.dot(m), if you're interested.