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I recently ran into an odd little problem while working with a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro (installed as part of a CS6 suite) in Windows. In this case both the problem and the solution were specific to when I had installed Acrobat and the platform that I was using at the time. This particular instance of Windows 8.1 wasn’t very old – all of the data had recently been transferred from a Windows 7 system.

Sometime last week, while attempting to view a PDF file from within Outlook, the installed copy of Acrobat X simply quit working. It didn’t fail with an error. It simply didn’t launch. My other Adobe CS6 applications continued to work just fine. This sudden change in behavior was a bit alarming at first but it didn’t take me very long to identify the problem.

It seems that, for whatever reason, Acrobat encountered a problem when it had passed the initial 30-day trial period. This is even more of an oddity considering that I had never set it up to act as a trial – the product key was correctly entered when I originally installed the software.

While searching for a solution I stumbled upon an Adobe support document (possibly linked from a forum post somewhere) that describes the problem I was having and it also offers a file to fix the problem. In my case Solution 1 worked perfectly. Acrobat Pro now opens once again. The link to the support document is included below:

Acrobat Help / Doesn’t launch after 30 days | Installed as part of a CS6 suite