If Adobe Acrobat crashes as it is opening the problem may be due to too many Acrobat temporary files. I've observed this problem with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 and I believe it is present in other versions as well. The following procedure should correct the problem:
- Click on "Start".
- Select "All Programs" or "Programs" depending on your operating system.
- Select "Accessories".
- Select "Windows Explorer".
- Double-click on "My Computer" in the left pane of the window that opens.
- Double-click on drive "C:".
- Double-click on the "Documents and Settings" folder.
- Double-click on the folder that matches the username you use to log into your PC. If you don't find an exact match, you will need to pick the one most likely to hold your data.
- Double-click on the "Local Settings" folder. If you don't see it, then you will need to change Explorer's configuration to display hidden files. You can do so by clicking on "Tools", then "Folder Options" and then "View". Under "Hidden files and folders", check "Show hidden files and folders" and then click on "OK". You can put the setting back to its previous setting after you have finished this procedure.
- Under the "Local Settings" folder, double-click on the "Temp" folder. If the files are not sorted in alphabetical order by file name, click on "Name" at the top of the Name column to sort them by file name.
- Scroll down until you see files that begin with the name "Acr". The type should be "TMP file". Click on the first one to highlight it. Then scroll down to the last one and, while holding down a shift key, click on it. Now all of the temporary Acrobat files should be created. These are files that are only needed temporarily by Acrobat, so they are safe to delete.
- Right-click and pick properties. The number of files you have selected will be displayed. If you see over 65,535 of these files, the large number of files is likely your problem. Click on "OK" to close the Properties window.
- Right-click again, while all of the files are still highlighted and select "Delete". When asked if you wish to send all of the files to the Recycle Bin, choose "Yes". If you hold down the shift key, while clicking on "Delete", the files won't even go into your Recycle Bin, where they could be recovered, but will instead be permanently deleted, which is probably a better option in this case, since you shouldn't ever need to recover them.
- If you changed Explorer's configuration to display hidden files, you can now put it back to what it was before by clicking on "Tools" and going through the procedure outlined above to change the way Explorer deals with hidden files. If not, you can just close the Windows Explorer window.
- Reopen Acrobat. If the cause of Acrobat crashing was too many temporary files it should now open without a problem.
