Ben’s Mind

I’m not about to go into all of the 10,000+ possible things you can do to attempt to fix whatever is causing this, including, but not limited to, firing a semi-automatic at your server. But you shouldn’t do that, since it’s not your hardware’s fault that Adobe Acrobat can’t work right. You could, however, go skeet shooting with the Acrobat CD! I’m only going to share what we did that seems to work for us.

To clarify our configuration:

Windows 2003 Server x86 Terminal Server
Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.1 (with 8.1.3 update)

We have been fighting the dreaded “Serious Error” message in Acrobat for a few months. It all started when we changed the processors in one of our terminal servers. The error I’m referring to is the one in Adobe Acrobat where it suddenly hangs for some unknown amount of time and then crashes with a “Serious Error has occurred” message.

My system administrator and I searched and searched with no luck in the Adobe forums. We tried it on a clean terminal server install, we tried messing with permissions, filemon, procmon, etc.

Finally, I had noticed a pattern, in the registry, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\8.0\AVGeneral has a bActivated and bLastExitNormal which was setting itself to 0 (false). I think Acrobat was thinking it wasn’t actived, and since my users weren’t admins, they key must not have been able to rewrite itself. But this key only changed when Acrobat locked up and gave the serious error. If you killed the acrobat.exe process before the error, the key stayed. Once we remotely changed everyone’s keys, it worked, until we started adding more users who didn’t have this key.

Finally, we thought we had everyone, but we received the error again. We went through and fixed them all again. This time, I felt like the only thing “patch”-related we didn’t do was this licensing service patch from Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3750.

We also created a login script addendum as follows:

AdobeAcroFix.bat

REGEDIT /s \\orourke.local\sysvol\orourke.local\scripts\Acro8RegFix.reg

AdobeAcroFix.reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\8.0\AVGeneral]
 "bLastExitNormal"=dword:00000001
 "bActivated"=dword:00000001

So in summary, here’s what we did:

1. If on terminal server run change user /install from the command line
2. Install Acrobat Professional 8
3. Reboot if necessary
4. Make sure/update to 8.1.3
5. Reboot if necessary
6. If on terminal server run change user /install from the command line
7. Install the Adobe Licensing patch, following the instructions exactly at the bottom of the page
8. Reboot (if you followed the directions)
9. On your DC, or local machine, setup the above batch file and registry file.
10. Cross your fingers!

I sincerely hope this helps some of you suffering for as long as we did (or longer).