For the past two weeks or so, I’ve been unable to use Adobe Acrobat Reader. It would freeze up on me, regardless of whether I attempted to open a file in a browser, in the system, or just launch the program. This was a rather serious problem, as all of my class readings this semester are in PDF format.

I tried reinstalling Acrobat Reader 6 — twice. I googled for advice based upon the error message, but no luck at all. Adobe’s help file was completely useless.

I tried installing Acrobat Reader 5 — twice. That didn’t work either. However, the error message was different and, as it turned out, far more informative. (It told me “temporary file could not be opened.”) In some online miscellaneous notes about computer stuff, I found this:

Reader creates temp files which it is supposed to clean up after itself. it has a bug and sometimes creates 64000 temp files and then can’t open since it has run out of numbers to assign to new tmp files. Problem was solved by going to CMD prompt in the temp directory (/Local Settings/Temp), then del acr*.tmp

Well, my Temp directory was indeed plagued with a proliferation of acr*.tmp files. I deleted them… and lo and behold, I can now open PDF files. Really, that tidbit would have been really %@*# helpful in Adobe’s help file. I probably spent a total of about 3 hours trying to fix the problem. What a waste.