🚀 go-pugleaf

Dear Claudio,
You are an idiot. Please reconnect fingers to brain. Message #5 answers half of the original poster's questions but does not address any other questions asked by that poster or anyone else in this thread, specifically, how to disable this useless and annoying function. As graffiti said, it can only be disabled with Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Here is how:
With the annoying PDF document open, go to View-->Navigation Tabs-->Articles.
Right-click on the one that says PDFThreading and select Delete.
Done and done.

This detailed and lengthy solution was found in the Adobe Reader help menu, in the help page "Editing and deleting articles." If there are more than one article threads to delete, or it isn't named PDFThreading, well, click on the name of the thread and look at the text of your PDF to see if that thread was applied to all the text where this zoom-hand appears, and chances are that's the one you want to get rid of.