🚀 go-pugleaf

Yesterday I noticed a posting, I believe it was here, from someone who seemed to know what he was talking about.  I can't find that posting now, or I'd reference him directly.  He observed that people seemed to be having a lot of trouble with Adobe Reader 5.05 freezing their computers, and suggested they might want to try backing off to Adobe Reader 4.05.  I tried that, and **IT WORKED**.  The fairly complicated .pdf file that reliably froze my Win 98 using AR 5.05, works fine with AR 4.05, and AR 4.05 even seems a lot faster and smoother displaying it.  (Maybe it's because it's barely larger than half the size of AR 5.05.) 

You can try this too, by going to: 

   ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/win/4.x/ 

and downloading (via FTP): 

   ar405eng.exe 

which is the installer for the English-language version of AR 4.05. 

You should first carefully uninstall AR 5.05 and any other AR stuff, and manually clean up anything left lying around, before you run this AR 4.05 installer, of course. 

My strong suspicion is that Adobe has "enhanced" its Reader to take advantage of features available in the newer versions of the Windows OS, which simply do not work reliably under Win 98, at least, and which provoke very bad failures at least there, quite often.  Shame on Adobe, at least for not documenting this very bad AR 5.05 flaw in some real obvious and clear disclaimer! 

Many thanks for your excellent advice, posting person, whoever you were, you saved me!