I’m posting this here because it took forever for me to figure out how to fix it and I want to potentially save hassle for others who may have this issue.
Expected result: Acrobat working as intended and not completely breaking when using basic UI functions.
Actual result: Constant errors and crashing to desktop.
Context: Adobe released a silent update that automatically updated Adobe Acrobat DC to 64-bit last year and slowly rolled out to all users. This update broke my installation. I was getting constant errors when clicking on “File” or “Edit” which yielded “An internal error has occurred.” It was also having issues displaying icons, printing, consistent freezing and crashing on opening any PDF file. This was a gradual roll-out made the error occur at different times on different machines.
I believe this caused some issues with Adobe Creative Cloud since it wasn’t recognizing my user profile and tried to load my files with the default profile. I don’t know why this would break the software but it did.
The way to get around this was to uninstall the 64 but version and install the 32 but solution in its place. Adobe does have a “clean” uninstall tool but it didn’t work, so I had to uninstall it through Creative Cloud.
Solution:
- Uninstalled Adobe Acrobat DC Pro via Adobe Creative Cloud
- Rebooted
- Downloaded the old 32-bit Adobe Acrobat Pro DC from here.
- Unzipped the .zip file, ran Setup.exe in administrator mode
- Disabled the automatic update to 64-bit by editing in the Registry Editor: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\
- Created new key called “Feature Lockdown”
- Added a new DWORD (32-bit) value
- Set the value to 0, hexadecimal
- Rebooted
- Relaunched Adobe Acrobat Pro DC
- Tested it by opening up a PDF, watermarking, and printing to ensure that editing/printing functionality works