Tech Notes

Tech Note #20200001

As reported by a customer, after varying lengths of time, perfectly good, working, installed versions (verified in Version 11.x but also reported on the Internet in Version 10.x) of Windows Adobe Acrobat begin consistently crashing at startup, without rhyme or reason, with the error message "acrobat has stopped working" and error code "c0000005". The offending module is "Acrobat.dll".

Further symptoms are that the crash occurs approximately ten to twelve seconds after startup and whether Acrobat is simply opened with no active file (e.g. by clicking the desktop icon) or with an active file (e.g. by clicking an associated PDF in file manager). This behavior has been observed on Windows 7 and reported on Windows 10, but does not appear to take place on Windows XP.

Various discussions on the Internet suggest that the crash is caused by the permissions on the Acrobat executable being mysteriously changed, that the executable suddenly needs to be run as Administrator, etc., etc. Yet, in many cases, attempts to mitigate the situation by manimpulating permissions, etc. do not result in returning Acrobat to operating condition.

Further, but otherwise futile, attempts to rectify the problem by removing and reinstalling Acrobat, clearing the Registry of all Acrobat-, and in fact Adobe-, related keys, deleting cache files from disk and essentially removing all vestiges of Acrobat and its ilk from the system are also fruitless. The problem persists.

However, it should be noted that disconnecting the system's Internet connection, prior to and during Acrobat's startup, for a period of approximately 20-30 seconds, fixes the problem immediately. Acrobat starts and runs normally.

Furthermore, once Acrobat has started, the Internet can be reconnected and it will continue to run (verified for over twelve hours). In addition, once a single copy of Acrobat has been started successfully, and continues to run, additional copies of Acrobat may be started and stopped without experiencing any problems whatsoever — in other words normally.

Thus, it would appear that Acrobat is making a single request, via the Internet, to the mother ship and is receiving an unfavorable result that it then turns into a crash. Whether this is intentional or accidental is a matter of speculation but it appears to occur whether or not Acrobat has recently been updated (i.e. for at least one formerly-running example, the customer had updating turned off).

Attempts to disable the remote query by "adjusting" the obviously-networked features in Preferences, such as Updater ("Do not download or install updates automatically"), Trust Manager (unchecking "Load trusted root certificats from an Adobe server...") and Tracker ("Automatically Check for New Comments and Form Data" set to "Never"), have no effect. The only consistenly successful strategy, which incidentally does not require you to "fix" anything else, is to disable the Internet connection.

On the one hand, mitigation is fairly easy. Temporarily disabling the Internet connection, either by pulling out the network cable or disabling the network adapter or WiFi adapter through the Network and Sharing Center (or its equivalent) and then opening a dummy PDF, which will remain open forever, before re-enabling the Internet connection, is effective but annoying. Note that you must open an actual PDF for the instance of Acrobat to remain active. If you do not open a file, the next time that you do, the already-open instance will be reused, to view that file, and then it will be lost when you close it.

On the other hand, having to temporarily shut off the network, in order to start up Acrobat, is something that people would, obviously, prefer not to do. Particularly if you are the adminstrator of a large network and you'd need to "educate" a large number of users as to how to circumvent the problem. It might be worthwhile to investigate whether your edge router could be made to dump all of the traffic to the Adobe mother ship into the bit bucket so that all attempts by Acrobat to contact it would always fail. This would certainly solve the problem "permanently" but it would also preclude automatic updates from working, and so on.

Speaking of updates, automatic or otherwise, it is possible that this problem has been fixed by a later update or version of Acrobat, although we haven't seen anything to that effect on the Internet and the problem has been extant for some time. Also, before spending a lot of time trying to work around the problem, you might want to check whether your Acrobat license is still valid and/or contact Adobe to complain about the product's behavior, since it is apparent that it is contact with the mother ship that is causing the problem.