I have had a heck of a problem with Adobe on my system and it was driving me crazy. It would work as a stand-alone program, but whenever I tried to open up a PDF file through IE, it would lock up first IE and then Regular Explorer. So you would think I could just uninstall and re-install right???
Well you would be wrong. First, when I tried to uninstall, it told me that I was missing a patch file and would have to abort......Great....just what I wanted....
So I found this tool from MS that allows you to remove items that were installed using Windows Installer
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=290301
It seems pretty straight forward, Click on the program and select Remove.
That went pretty smooth. But then when trying to re-install Adobe Acrobat version 8 (The current version), I could not get the Adobe downloader to work.
What a pain !!!!!!!!!!!
Well, to make a long story short.... I am sure there is a work-around to this.... but I instead found a stand-alone installer at this link.
http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/7x/7.0.8/enu/AdbeRdr708_en_US.exe
It is only 7.0.8, but at least my system doesnt crash now :). Maybe when I have time I will troubleshoot this more.
Happy (or not so happy) programing.
Doc