Adobe Acrobat - Problem with "Web Documents"

Recently when browsing the internet, when I have had the need to open a pdf-link on the internet (as opposed to a stand alone pdf document), and after I have done this if I click anywhere in the Acrobat window, I am unable to control browsing within that document, text is highlighted whenever I move the cursor away from the place I first clicked on the screen, scrolling if I go beyond the limit of the Acrobat screen. My CPU usage rises to 100%. I cannot close the window because my mouse click is inactive everywhere except in taskbar, which fortunately means I am able to use the only way I know to enable me to excape from this trap, kill the IE process in TaskManager. This is especially annoying because it means that I can not save the document as pdf file, nor print it, for later reference, even when the site says 'Print version (pdf)' , and a new page opens with the pdf version.

But that's not all. I am often left with one or both processes AcroRd32.exe and/or AcroRd32Info.exe running: if the former it occupies nearly all of my CPU, if the latter it's just using a little memory, but no window is open, and I have to kill those processes in the TaskManager too. Further, in these if I open an Acrobat document-link I am unable to print or save the document as a pdf file to my PC for viewing later, although if I hover my mouse over these buttons before I click anywhere in the document it displays their function correctly, and if I then click on one of those buttons the Acrobat process becomes 'not responding'. If I open an Acrobat document that I have previously saved on my PC everything seems OK.

Late last year I had a similar problem with Excel (scroll locking), but that seems to have gone away now. I have the Acrobat pdf reader ver 8.3.1

Has anybody any idea what is wrong ? And how I and fix it ? (sorry for the length of this post)

Dumb_Question
8.June.2012
Compaq Presario S5160UK DT261A (Celeron 2.7 GHz 1.5GB RAM) - MSI MS6577 v2.1- XP/SP3

 

That particular version is well out of date and full of security vulnerabilities.
Either upgrade to the latest Adobe offering, or have a look at some of the alternative PDF viewers - PDF-XChange, Sumatra PDF, Foxit Reader

edit: DavidGP pulled the trigger faster than me. LOL

 

Thank you for your posts.

I am slow to install updates, because to me an update is like saying "We got it it wrong, and this is a bodge to try to correct it" - I realise that tis view isn't always absolutely correct - "if it works don't fix it" (I realise that security updates do not fall into this category, but I generally do not want additional 'features')

-> DavidGP - there are other issues why I do not wish to reboot my PC !

Thanks once again

Dumb_Question
8.June.2012
Compaq Presario S5160UK DT261A (Celeron 2.7 GHz 1.5GB RAM) - MSI MS6577 v2.1- XP/SP3

 

I would also recommend that you install the latest Adobe Reader 10.1.3; it has great security enhancements over previous versions. I have it installed on several XP systems, and it works without a problem.

You do need to uninstall 8.3.1 before installing version 10; this is always recommended when you skip a major version (9.x in this case).

You can uninstall it from Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs, or use an external uninstaller, or use Acrobat Cleaner (only if you do not have any commercial Adobe software installed).

 

P.S. to save online PDF documents to your local disk, right-click on the link, then select Save target as...