Acrobat and Outlook ?

LoLth

yet another bit of pc weirdness....

the setup:
Windows XP sp2 - fully updated
Account has local admin rights
Outlook 2003
Word 2002 (xp)
adobe reader 8.1
Dual core cpu (E4200 i think)
Exchange Server 2003

What happening:
everything toddles along fine until any attachment is added to an email. then the following happens:

Both cores of the CPU hit 50%
Outlook stops responding
Acrord32info.exe uses 50% CPU

after about 10 minutes , everything returns to normal and the attchment appears on the email.


Observations and attempts to fix so far:
Makes no difference what type of file it is or whether it is local or not.

Word is the default email editor but this happens whether or not its RTF, HTML or plain Text ( on any other PC acrord32info.exe only seems to pop up briefly in the task menu process list if you are using RTF as your mail format)
Reinstalled adobe reader 8.1 - no change

happens any account on that PC

If you end the process, the attachment appears fine

Changing the process to run on a single core pushes that core up to 100%

Size of attachment seems to have no relation to how long this goes on for (a 54k .doc file took longer than a 300k pdf but a 92k pdf took far longer than a 1mb .xls or a 564k .doc - I have the exact timings written down somewhere).

Network, policies etc are all reporting fine.

DNS server changed about two months ago

any ideas what could be causing this ?

matt-dublin

turn off word as the default email editor, that slows things up hugely i've noticed.

also install office 2003 sp2 (http://officeupdate.microsoft.com)

i had huge problems with office 2k3 and acrobat, but when i installed 2k7 it sorted itself all out.

also try this:
1. Click START.
2. Select RUN.
3. Type: "regsvr32 scrrun.dll" (no quotes, and don't forget the space)
4. Click OK.

Capt'n Midnight

there is a start up group in Acrobat - if you empty it then the acrobat starts faster and less to interfere

BopNiblets

Foxit PDF!
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

LoLth

Thanks for the replies.

A quick update:
Its still happening. Downloaded and ran processmon from sysinternals which showed acrord32info.exe constantly sending read requests for a 10mb pdf document in the documents folder.

This was a constant thing but the slowdown was only noticeable when prefetch went to run in the same folder during attachments.

Moved the pdf to C:\ and the process kept trying to access it from there. Copied to the network and then removed every reference to the file from recent documents / histories / acrobat reader history etc. Grand, it stopped trying to access it.... but now its constantly running through every other pdf on the PC.

Its a good bit better and the pc is now usable (a constant 10% cpu usage though on both cores) but I'd like to sort this once and for all.

Did the above steps by the way. Email is now html ,default editor is notepad

no startup group I can find in acrobat

software written for us has to use adobe reader , so foxit etc are not an option unfortunately.

any ideas ?

Capt'n Midnight

Probably not related to your problem but you can remove some plugins

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=333213&sliceId=2
Troubleshoot system errors or freezes (Acrobat 8.x, Acrobat 3D 8 on Windows 2000 and XP)

Remove third-party plug-ins from the Acrobat plug-ins folder. The default location for the Acrobat plug-ins folder is Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Acrobat\plug_ins. ( copy them back later if you wish )



Turn off all the auto update / speculative downloads in Acrobat