🚀 go-pugleaf

I had already checked through all the preferences twice on my powerbook at home, where Reader 8 runs with no problem (I do not have CS2 at home) and never found a pref for turning off updating.

The method to disable the plugin from the Get Info window is a good alternative to deleting the plugin folder out of the application package.

Update -- I think the pref is not within Reader itself, but within a program that gets launched by Reader, called Adobe Updater. If you go to Help > Check for Updates, it will launch the Adobe Updater program (which resides in /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Utilities/Adobe Updater5/). After it checks for updates, it displays a window saying "there are no updates available at this time" with two buttons, Quit and Preferences. If you click the Preferences button, there you can turn off automatic updates.

But as Mark mentioned, if the application is crashing, you won't have access to this pref. I think the Get Info window would be the best way -- it works like a preference in that you can easily turn it back on again once the issue is resolved.