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HP installed Sweetlabs taskbar add-on start menu hanging
Never mind this. It was nothing to do with Adobe.
I posted the following in Adobe's own forum.
I've just uninstalled Adobe Acrobat Reader DC on the suspicion that it was causing an operating system problem on my PC, that Adobe Reader DC was behaving as malware.
Whether I have correctly identified the issue I have come here to ask because if I have, the reputation of Adobe is about to take a dive to a crisis low but this is fair warning so that Abobe can put things right and rescue its reputation before it is too late.
I am running Microsoft Windows 8.1 on a HP Desktop PC.
When I was uninstalling Acrobat Reader DC I think the date of installation was 14th January 2016 - some 9 days or so ago.
The symptoms were that the "house icon" Start text-style menu was not popping up as it should. This meant that I could not access any functions through the start menu or even shut down my PC as normal.
I could still access the pseudo-touch button start menu and via that I was able to access the PC Settings - Update and recovery and I was seriously considering a "Refresh your PC without accessing your files" involving removing dozens of applications and a lot of work to get my PC working again, but that would have been a panic measure so I investigated deeper.
I found a suspect via the Task Manager. Via the "Details" menu I found that a file by the name of "RdrCEF.exe" was using about 8% of CPU time and had hogged an extraordinary amount of memory. I didn't note the figure but it may have been something like 2 GB, certainly far more data than any other process listed by the Task Manager.
I used the "Search online" function to discover this "RdrCEF.exe" was something to do with Acrobat Reader DC and the search results of online discussions said that claimed there were malware problems, something to do with sending data to Amazon or something.
The online search identified the location of "RdrCEF.exe", and I was able to track it down to this folder -
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroCEF
At this point I started to get a bad feeling about Acrobat Reader DC and decided to uninstall it.
I can still read my PDF files on my PC after uninstalling because Windows 8.1 has a simple PDF reader it offers up.
Both Internet Explorer and Chrome are able to read PDF files on the internet too.
My PC now seems back to normal but it is early days yet.
It seems to me that a cloud of suspicion has descended upon Adobe because of what is going on with Acrobat Reader DC, crashing my computer operating system and I guess I am not the only one that has happened to.
So this looks to me like a crisis for Adobe, either upon it or looming, and I trust we PDF file readers can expect an emergency response?
Last edited by Peter Dow; 24 Jan 2016 at 12:05.