Vista and Adobe Updater
Ever since I upgraded to Vista, I’ve had trouble with automatic updates to Adobe products. Since I was rebuilding my tablet PC to use Vista, I figured I would find out what was going on.
The problem, in nutshell, is that Adobe Updater would report that updates were available for Reader, but when I tried to apply them, Updater would fail and/or report an error like “Invalid Drive U:\”. My Documents are redirected to my network home directory on U:\. I had previously found that turning off UAC or resetting my documents directory to the default location would allow me to complete the update.
Today, I found a solution. Thanks to http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?id=3890. It seems that Updater needs to run in the elevated security context of Administrator. Administrator does have a HOMEPATH variable pointing to U:, but didn’t have anything mapped to U: (it’s not me.)
To work around this:
- I ran the Command Prompt as Administrator (Start-Accessories-Command Prompt, right click and choose ‘Run as Administrator’)
- Net use – all drives are disconnected, no U: mapping
- net use u: \\server\share\directory
- run the updates from inside Acrobat (or from the tray if updater ran automatically)
I don’t know yet if the mapping is persistent across logins.
This applies to products since Actobat 8, in my case Acrobat 9.
Filed under: Vista