Try Acrobat DC
These forums are now Read Only. If you have an Acrobat question, ask questions and get help from the community.


Lots of AcroRd32.exe instances created -- have to kill them periodically

As I surf the web (using Chrome or IE), lot of AcroRd32.exe instances are created. They remain even after I close the browser. They hog memory and slow down my processes. I have to kill them. Again and again. They also throw errors periodically.

Until recently I though AcroRd was a great program. Now I think AcroRd has to be one of the worst programs ever. What changed?


w b


2 Answers

Which version of Reader are you using? The latest is 10.1.1, see Help->About Adobe Reader to find out the version number.


Abhigyan Modi   

Every time the mouse hovered over a pdf file, two AcroRd instances were created. They don't go away by themselves, hogging memory and silently paralyzing the machine. Sometimes, it threw a series of "Acrobat failed to connect to a DDE server" errors.

The solution was to disable/unregister the pdfshell:


regsvr32 "%CommonProgramFiles%\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\pdfshell.dll" /u

This crazy problem apparently drove lots of folks to switch to Foxit.


w b   

Please specify a reason: