Acrobat Reader 6.0 (and 6.0.1) freeze and other performance problems

My parents home office computer has had all kinds of problems with their ability to read PDF files for about 6 months now.

The last time I was in town, before I left my Dad mentioned that Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0.1 was having problems getting past the splash screen. He said it would load the splash screen, then freeze, and you'd have to kill it manually to get it to go away. So, in an attempt to fix the problem I did the first thing you should always do when a program is being nasty. I cried like a baby. Shortly after that, I uninstalled the program and reinstalled it to see if it was a setting that had been changed, or some kind of freak incident. Well, that didn't do it and I didn't have time to look at the problem in more detail.

So, today I sat down once again to fix it. I installed and uninstalled it... no good. It still hung up on the splash screen and would use about 89% of the cpu consistently until I ended the task with CTRL-ALT-DEL. So, I did the risky thing, and went into "regedit" and deleted any registry entries that I thought might be related to adobe. It was a longshot, I know, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

I looked around online a bit and found that some other people had fixed similar problems by deleting temporary files from their C:\Documents and Settings\(Username)\Local Settings\Temp\ directory. It turns out that Adobe, for some reason, created all these temp files... maybe for every PDF file that has been viewed... who knows. Deleting all these files, numbering in the thousands, alleviated the problem.

Windows Explorer locked up on me when I tried to delete all of them, so I went old school on the problem and loaded up the command prompt. I did this by going to the start menu, select run, and type "cmd" in the box and hit enter. After this, I navigated to the directory listed above with "cd C:\Documents and Settings\(your username here)\Local Settings\Temp\" and hit enter. The command I used was "del *.tmp". This just deleted all the files that ended with .tmp. As soon as I did this, the program started up with no problems.

Lastly, I found a method for decreasing the load time dramatically. You can find instructions here. It worked well for me, and I hope it works well for anyone else who stumbles across this page. Note that in the article it says that using this method will disable the ability of acrobat to read encrypted PDF files. However, in all my days of reading PDF's, I don't think I've had need to read one of those. Also, I think it may have stunted my ability to update acrobat... but you can just switch the folder names back, and update... I switched the folders back, tried to update again, and it updated as it was supposed to.