I'm not certain there has ever been a time in my life when Acrobat has functioned properly, but now it's just not functioning at all. I can't view PDF files in a web-browser anymore (Firefox hangs if I try). If I try to download the PDF view it outside of a web browser the Acrobat document viewer hangs on startup. This is the same with Acrobat Reader and Acrobat Professional. Now, normally I wouldn't write a post about it, I would just uninstall and reinstall and see if that fixed anything, but this time I feel is special. I found out today that if I start Acrobat in debug mode with MSVC++ and run it like that, the program works just fine. This makes no sense to me. Does anyone know why that might happen? Is the actual execution of the program different when I'm stepping through it in a debugger? Any ideas on how to fix this so that it doesn't require me to pretend to debug the program in order for it to work?

i can't view pdfs within a browser but if i save it and open it outside of a browser it works fine

At the risk of being unhelpful:

Acrobat is slow. Foxit Reader is much nicer.

Naurava: Good information, but the program never actually crashes. I should have made that more clear in my original post, sorry. The program simply stops responding once it gets to the splash image. I have to manually end the process or it'll just sit there and do nothing. Unless, of course, I run it under the debugger, then it'll finish loading and everything.

load_bitmap_file: The exact opposite of unhelpful, that really is an incredible program, thanks a thousand times for that link! Now, do you know how I can make Firefox use the Foxit Reader to load PDF files? IE seems to be doing it automatically, which is great, but Firefox is still trying to use Acrobat, and thus is still freezing up.

EDIT: I see that's a Pro feature, I guess I'll just be downloading my PDFs from now on then.

[Edited by - Samith on August 26, 2007 4:46:09 PM]

I hate to ask the obvious, but have you actually tried to uninstall and reinstall the application yet?

Quote:I found out today that if I start Acrobat in debug mode with MSVC++ and run it like that, the program works just fine. This makes no sense to me.

Does anyone know why that might happen? Is the actual execution of the program different when I'm stepping through it in a debugger?

Could be a symptom of a race condition, or faulty locking mechansims on multithreaded code resulting in a deadlock. When you run a program in a debugger, the execution times all change, which obviouly has an impact on any bug which depends on timing.

Quote:Original post by Nemesis2k2
I hate to ask the obvious, but have you actually tried to uninstall and reinstall the application yet?

Quote:I found out today that if I start Acrobat in debug mode with MSVC++ and run it like that, the program works just fine. This makes no sense to me.

Does anyone know why that might happen? Is the actual execution of the program different when I'm stepping through it in a debugger?

Could be a symptom of a race condition, or faulty locking mechansims on multithreaded code resulting in a deadlock. When you run a program in a debugger, the execution times all change, which obviouly has an impact on any bug which depends on timing.

That was the only thing I could think of that would cause the debugger to work but not the normal execution. And no, I haven't tried uninstalling and reinstalling yet. I seem to have misplaced my Adobe CS case and I don't want to search all over my house for it. So I've only gotten as far as uninstalling. The Foxit reader is much nicer to use, and I think I'll just leave it at that. A free browser based reader would be nice, but I think I can make do without.

Wow, a buggy Adobe product? Never.