Why can't Adobe Acrobat Reader, arguably one of the most essential pieces of software out there, just play nice with the rest of my systems?
Through several browser versions on three different systems, over several system rebuilds, running three different operating systems (XP Pro, XP Media Center, and Vista), one thing has remained consistent: Acrobat reader has been and continues to be a stability problem.
Acrobat reader hogs up resources on my main XP machine, eventually preventing me from opening any additional windows. I hate tabbed browsing, so I open new web pages in new windows. Once I start killing processes, I always find at least one non-visble IE instance that is hogging memory and resources. One instance, that is, for each process that was hosting an Acrobat Reader control. I also find Adobe Acrobat Reader hanging out in the processes list, and have to kill it too (just killing it doesn't free up the IE process it is hogging)
On all three systems, Acrobat reader is what prevents my machine from restarting correctly. It's always the process that is hanging around, refusing to allow a reboot until I kill it.
This has been the case on all my machines, for years. I've gone through multiple Acrobat Reader updates, and through multiple versions of browsers. It happens on my two PCs (XP Pro and Vista) and my wife's PC (XP Media Center). You'd think after all the updates that Adobe pushes out to this product, they'd fix the problems.
It drives me nuts. It drives my wife nuts. Annoying to say the very least as Adobe has an effective monopoly in this space, so I'm stuck using this POS software.
