After “upgrading” to the latest version of adobe reader, I found myself experiencing an old annoyance again. Long story short, reader would launch two copies of itself whenever I hovered my mouse cursor over, or selected, a PDF file in windows explorer. It does this to display metadata such as author and title in the tooltips for PDFs, as well as providing a thumbnail preview when a PDF is selected. However, I never really use the extra information it throws at me, and the frequent flickering of the mouse cursor (not to mention the sudden spikes in CPU usage) was seriously getting on my nerves.
In adobe reader 9, it was easy enough to turn off this “feature” simply by deleting a registry key that was fairly easy to find. With adobe reader 10 now installed, that fix didn’t have any effect, even after forcing the windows shell to restart. Something a little more elegant was needed. I found what I was looking for, disturbingly enough, at the US-CERT website in an article about a buffer overflow vulnerability. On the bright side, that means that getting rid of this annoyance makes my computer more secure! All I had to do was issue one command at the command prompt:
regsvr32 /u “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\pdfshell.dll”
Although the article is a couple of years old, it looks like adobe hasn’t changed its overall approach much. Unregistering that one DLL made a world of difference: my PDF tooltips are once again fast and lightweight. It would be nice if adobe’s metadata display system were less clunky. Failing that, they could at least include an option in the preferences dialog allowing users to turn it off.
