Well, the latest update for Acrobat, while happily installing on Windows 7 64-bit, will not run due to missing files. I guess that it will only work on Windows 10 now.

How bad is it that they don't even bother to do an OS check before installing? Pathetic.

Robbbert wrote on 2026-02-20, 08:12:

How bad is it that they don't even bother to do an OS check before installing? Pathetic.

OS check is not reliable.

I heard back then some WinXP-targeted programs would fail to install on Vista due to failed OS check, because they unconditionally checked for "minorVersion >= 1", but Vista's "minorVersion" was 0. Win7 was spared from the bad rep Vista had simply because Win7's "minorVersion" was 1 which will pass the aforementioned checks without any assistance.

And M$ had changed the behavior and return values of system version APIs since Win8.1. From what I tested with a Win10 VM, legacy version APIs (namely GetVersion/GetVersionEx) will return "6.2.9200", which is the same as Win8, for apps that were not explicitly targeted against newer Windows versions in their manifests.

Well there's plenty of other apps that know what to do. I ended up deleting Adobe off the computer entirely. If you go to the adobe site the only version they offer for download is the broken one.

I'll do a search for a WORKING replacement later.

EDIT: found an offline installer for version 21111 which worked. Just had to then do a few awful things to prevent it from updating itself again.

For 32-bit, I searched around the net for some offline installers, took them to where my computer collection resides, and started work. Turned out that every one of the downloads was faulty in some way, but at least I found out which file causes the thing to error out - it's the RDR Services Updater - probably the least important file in the entire package. But they think it's sooo important that the entire install has to be cancelled and rolled back.

So, for Windows 10 32-bit, both of them had not been able to proceed past 20180, which is quite old. I did a total uninstall, then manually deleted the left-over files, registry entries, and scheduled task. Then I got the latest 21223 from their site, and it installed fine. Just had to disable the cloud stuff as usual.

For windows 7 64-bit, most of them had 21078 which is close enough, so just locked it down so it couldn't update itself.

And lastly, Windows 7 32-bit, most of which has failed in some way months prior. If they had version 21xxx I just locked it down as above. For those with version 20xxx, it was uninstalled, same as I did for the windows 10 machines, but I found an offline installer on one of the machines, version 21043, which actually WORKS - so this was used followed by the usual locking down.

So, this gets all the Windows 7 machines to a fairly recent, working version of Reader, which will never get updated.

There's a couple of downsides of course, if you sign into adobe via the reader you can't do that any more, and most noticeably whenever you open the reader it complains twice that the updater can't be started. A small price to pay.

Some things to note: If you decide you don't want Adobe any more and uninstall it, it leaves behind the updater and a scheduled task to run it, which it does. I'm not sure what they are hoping to accomplish by doing that. You need to remove all the remnants yourself. And they leave behind all the registry entries (except for the policy which gets removed), so in the interest of cleanliness you may as well delete all that as well.

An update on this. On the 2 Win10 32-bit machines I did a total uninstall of 20180, and then was able to install the latest version.

They fixed the issue with win7 x64, so I've installed the latest and it works.

Failures still happen with win7 32-bit, so looks like 21184 is the latest that might work, if not 21043 definitely works. All of my machines with this OS have had the updates locked down so I don't get harassed by failure messages, and it won't download an almost 700MB file in the background every day.

Recently I looked further into the 32-bit problem, and I've come up with a way that has so far worked on all my 7/10 machines. Therefore they are all up to date as of the last time they were switched on.

So, Adobe, just like Edge and Chrome, install multiple ways to update itself, so if you try to disable it, it only comes back again. We need to disable every form of updating except one. We also need to disable the cloud interface. If you need to log onto an Adobe account, and you keep files in their cloud, then you'll have to sit this one out. This solution is only for private standalone installations.

All references to folders and programs are as on Windows 7.

So, very old installs may have something in the "Run" part of the registry. Use msconfig to find and delete it.

Then, in Services, find, stop, and disable the "Adobe Acrobat Update Service".

Then, in Scheduled Tasks, Task Scheduler Library, disable the "Adobe Acrobat Update Task".

Next is to delete 4 files. In Program Files, Adobe, Adobe Reader DC, Reader, delete ADNotificationManager.exe, and AdobeCollabSync.exe . If they are running, kill them off with the Task Manager.

In the subfolder that may be called AcroCEF (or similar), delete RdrCEF.exe and RdrServicesUpdater.exe - there may be more than one folder with similar names, you need to get rid of these 2 files from all of them.

Consider that "Repair Installation" can fail. Downloading a new installer can fail. The scheduled update can fail. If you start acrobat and click on "Check for Updates", this can also fail. But there's one way left, that they don't tell you about.

Open Task Manager and sort by "Image Name". Make sure there are no Adobe programs running. Open Adobe Reader and you'll see it appear in Task Manager. Wait a few seconds until AdobeARM.exe appears. Now close Reader.

AdobeARM (named Adobe Reader and Manager on Windows 10) will take a while doing the update. An icon may appear in the tray during the process. You can click on it if you wish, to see the progress.

At the end, your new version will be installed. Now you must immediately delete those 4 files again, as well as disabling the service and scheduled task.

And... that's it. You're up to date. The next time you run Reader you might get a message that there's a problem. Just tick the box to not remind you again, and continue on.

The main cause of the failures is because RdrServicesUpdater.exe keeps growing. Eventually it gets so large that an internal integer overflows. On 64-bit, an integer is larger, so the problem doesn't happen. It may be that just deleting that file might be all that's required, but I didn't want Adobe sniffing around my files so I opted to get rid of the related things that take our computer resources without asking.

Great findings, Robbbert!

I've also known about Adobe's "multi-update-way vector" for a long time too - well, namely the service in Windows Services, the scheduled task, and the startup process. But I never went into such detail to see which file does what. On most systems I'd service (back in the day), I'd just run CCleaner portable to look into the system's start up processes, then disable/delete whatever I didn't think was needed (Adobe updater process (AdobeARM?) being one of them), then look into the windows services and schedule tasks and manually disable more stuff there. For Windows 7 in particular, there's a lot of stuff related to Telemetry that can (and should!) be disabled to free up resources.

Anyways, this is good to know in case I do ever want to much around with Adobe Reader again... though in all honesty, I've just moved on to other ways. On Windows 7 and 10 systems in particular, I still just use an old version of SumatraPDF for reading PDFs, and for editing/filling in forms, I use whatever comes built into the Firefox browser. At least for me, this seems to cover all of my use cases so far.

I forgot to mention, that if you tried to update via winget, that also failed.

I was able to update about 15 machines to 21431, and then yesterday now updated to 21529 - all with no failures. So I think the idea is proven. I found a document from the NSA / Dept of War that says how Reader can be locked down and disable the cloud, and surprisingly, how to stop it from sending usage statistics back to Adobe (I didn't know it did that). So I've applied that registry patch on all machines.