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I had a peculiar problem yesterday. A customer put one of my Delphi apps on some Toshiba laptops, and all was fine until it was time to generate some Acrobat files as a Rave 7 report, which produced the subject error.

The laptops had Acrobat 7 Standard installed with XP SP3 and IE8. I uninstalled Acrobat 7 Standard, put in Acrobat 5 Reader which they had lying around, and the problem went away. However, the customer doesn't see backtracking Acrobat as a solution, because the usual environment this Delphi app runs in of XP SP3, IE 7, and Acrobat 7 Standard doesn't show this problem.

A Google search didn't reveal any recent causes or effects. The Microsoft and Adobe KBs deny that any problem exists.

Any clues as to what specific area needs a workaround? Today I'm going to uninstall IE8 and reinstall IE7.

user122603
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    Did you check the PDF? Try loading it in notepad or a hex editor – Greg Jul 21 '09 at 10:15
  • Is it (legally or else) possible for you to upload a sample PDF somewhere that causes the problem? – balpha Jul 21 '09 at 10:16
  • Check for viruses. I've seen similar behaviour on an infected machine. – gabr Jul 21 '09 at 10:38
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    This is a very borderline SO question... – Argalatyr Jul 22 '09 at 01:26
  • I didn't have access to the laptop yesterday to try the IE8 uninstall. The *.pdf files were produced in a temp folder, and opened alright in Acrobat 7 Standard when double-clicked outside the app. – user122603 Jul 22 '09 at 08:30
  • @argalatyr: I also would want SO to help if I come across such a problem - let's not be so oversensitive and quick to issue warnings - troubleshooting new environments is part of systems development and programming. – Johan Bresler Jul 22 '09 at 08:42
  • @mm2010: I did not say it did not belong, I did not retag or flag, I did not vote to close. I commented, and appreciate your reply. – Argalatyr Jul 22 '09 at 14:28

4 Answers4

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I came a cross the same problem, in IE with the Adobe ActiveX plug-in. It was some time ago, but if I remember correctly the problem was the ActiveX in some versions of Acrobat 7, maybe combined with specific versions of the PDF itself. Installing the latest Adobe Reader solved the problem.

  • It turns out that Adobe fixed this problem, although one can't find that by searching their knowledge base. My boss serially updated Acrobat 7 Standard until the problem went away at 7.0.2. The problem didn't show in their usual environment because they were at 7.0.9. We'll be testing the current version of Acrobat 7 Standard as well as Acrobat 9 Standard to make sure that the problem stays solved. – user122603 Jul 23 '09 at 08:31
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If reinstalling Firefox (or your browser) and reinstalling Adobe Acrobat Reader does not work is because it is inheriting settings from past versions. What worked for me is doing a manual uninstall of all stored application data. In Win 7 Go to C:/users/your name/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla or Microsoft/ and the try to delete all of the content related to your browser including extensions and plugins. If you don't have permission to delete folders then open it and delete file by file.

Note that you have to be able to view hidden files to access AppData folder. Then do the same for the AppData under Adobe folder. Then reinstall Firefox and acrobat reader. Done!

Juan
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PDF files are suppose to start with the sequence "%PDF-X.Y"; however, some programs, email programs are notorious, will add a header, such as Mac Binary. Acrobat looks in the first 1024 bytes for the %PDF sequence. Other applications only support %PDF at the beginning of the file.

Dwight Kelly
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  • This was the correct solution. Open the file with Wordpad or notepad++, and if you see more than 1024 bytes of junk before the %PDF, then you know that this is the problem. Delete the junk, and the problem should go away. – NL3294 Jun 07 '17 at 23:19
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We were experiencing this and found that it was a matter of adding the site to the "allowed popups" list.

ivan
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