Acrobat 9 crashes on startup

[T Dixon]

Another MacPro in the room is experiencing crashes on startup of Acrobat 9, which was part of CS5. It was set to bypass the startup screen, so I don't know what it's trying to do when it dies. Here's what I did:

Uninstall, then reinstall. I started it up and it seemed fine: opened files, changed preferences. Then I reinstalled a set of plugins we use from Heidelberg - PDF Toolbox. And I couldn't open Acrobat after that. I remembered we had another problem because the OS was 10.6.x, and Heidelberg claimed that version of Java was too new for the version of their software that we use. We reverted to 10.5.8 for the MacPros that do most of that work. The MacPro with the crashes uses 10.6.8. I thought that a conflict between Java versions might be causing this issue also.

So I uninstalled the plugins, uninstalled Acrobat, used Onyx to clean out caches, rebuild Launch Services and reset permissions; restarted the Mac, reinstalled Acrobat - but it still crashes on startup.

It was working (for quite a while), then it wasn't. It's not my machine so I don't know what changes were made recently. I'd appreciate guidance on what path to take to diagnose this. I've copied the beginning of the crash report below.


Process: AdobeAcrobat [382]
Path: /Applications/Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro/Adobe Acrobat Pro.app/Contents/MacOS/AdobeAcrobat
Identifier: com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro
Version: 9.3.0 (9.3.0)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [96]

Date/Time: 2011-07-07 12:13:57.132 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.6.8 (10K540)
Report Version: 6

Interval Since Last Report: 195 sec
Crashes Since Last Report: 1
Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 6 sec
Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 1
Anonymous UUID: FDF375E0-CD77-4C6E-9F94-6079924FF389

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x000000001798e002
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Thread 0 Crashed: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

[Stephen Marsh]

You mention changing prefs...

Did you manually delete or force Acrobat to regenerate the prefs? What do you mean by "changing prefs"?


Good luck,

Stephen Marsh

[leonardr]

Uninstall, then reinstall. I started it up and it seemed fine: opened files, changed preferences. Then I reinstalled a set of plugins we use from Heidelberg - PDF Toolbox.

What if you do NOT install those plugins? Does Acrobat work correctly?

Are you using the latest version of their plugins? It seems like they have some issues (that you talk about with "java"), so I'd go talk to them...

[T Dixon]

Thank you for the replies. So, I wasn't as clear as I'd hoped.

By "changing preferences" I meant user preferences - Units & Guides, Page Display, etc.; I could start Acrobat and actually do things with it, as opposed to never getting past the splash screen. I trashed the preferences folders at the beginning of this journey, but that did nothing.

As to the plugins, I meant that after uninstalling them and Acrobat, then reinstalling Acrobat but NOT the plugins, Acrobat still crashed on launch. I restarted the Mac a few times, even after Onyx, but had only failure. So I gave up, hoping for a miracle.

And I guess it happened: this morning, the operator said Acrobat worked fine. I'm still guessing that the difference in Java versions was the cause, but perhaps the Mac needed a shutdown rather than a restart for anything to matter.