Here is a weird one. I have a client with approximately 50 users. One user started complaining that adobe and office 2010 were constantly crashing. By the time I was able to help that user, 3 more users started complaining that they had the same issue. This was yesterday.
Today, going into the office i had 10 more users complain that they had the same issue. The only common denominator between all of these users is the assistant HR person created a 4 page PDF from MS Publisher file and emailed the entire company.
The only users affected by Adobe crashing and Office crashing were users that had opened the HR pdf file. Any user that did not open this PDF was perfectly fine. Uninstalling and reinstalling Adobe and Office fixed the problem. You couldn’t just do a repair. It had to be the full uninstall.
Adobe was so messed up on those computers that I couldn’t even remove the PDF add-in from word and excel. But running word and excel in safe mode worked perfectly.
This did only affect users that had full adobe standard and not just the reader. This affect Office 2007 and 2010 as well as adobe standard 9 and X.
I have scanned the file with multiple antivirus programs and it is clean.
Has anyone ever seen a PDF file get something in it to break Adobe and then office. I haven’t tried opening it yet after doing the AV scans. I don’t want to chance breaking my computer right now. But I have never seen anything like this before that wasn’t virus related.
Apparently everyone was able to view the HR pdf file fine and then after viewing it, the crashes started.
Uninstalling just adobe seemed to help for a few hours, but then office started crashing for most people so I had to reload again.
Thanks for any insight on this. I just want to avoid something like this happening in the future.