This may be due to having a huge amount of Temporary Files on your hard drive. The temporary directories in Windows' are basically dumping grounds for just about every program that does some sort of nontrivial action.
Surprisingly, in Windows one of the causes for a number of undiagnosed program failures are due to Temporary directories. A temporary directory that happens to be littered with trash and temp files can cause applications to not work or bomb out inexplicably, even after the program has been removed and reinstalled. Because of this problem, it's best to keep your Windows Temporary Folder Directories clean.
I recently had over 100GB in the temp files folder, and after deleting the Temporary Files in the temp folder, Adobe Reader started up normally and begain working again.
To delete your Temp Files on Windows 7 do the following:
- Go to Windows Start -> Computer -> then right click on your hard drive OS (C:) -> then select "Properties"
- In the Properties pop-box, on the General tab, click on Disk Cleanup. Let it run.
- Now in the Disk Cleanup pop-up box, check the box "Temporary files" and click OK.
This should help clear out any files that may be causing an issue with Adobe Reader. You may also want to reinstall Adobe Reader using the direct download file.
Here's how you can get Adobe Reader installed on your Windows 7 computer using the direct download file:
- Uninstall Adobe Reader, if it hasn't been yet.
- Restart your computer.
- Now download the Adobe Reader file directly to your computer found here: http://get.adobe.com/reader/direct/
- Then install Adobe Reader using the file you just downloaded from your computer.
This should install correctly and fix the bugs that were causing Adobe Reader to not open .pdf's. For whatever reason, the direct download of Adobe Reader found here: http://get.adobe.com/reader/direct/ works much better and doesn't hang when installing on Windows 7.
The direct download is much better than the typical internet "Run As" installation of Adobe Reader found here: http://get.adobe.com/reader/
Acrobat Help / Quick fix | Install, download | Reader http://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/quick-fix-instal...