🚀 go-pugleaf

I am also having this problem in 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate.

I do not have the "always show icons, never thumbnails" folder option checked. I have attempted to "Repair installation" from within the Adobe products. Thumbnails that have already been generated show up correctly, but documents that do not have thumbnails yet just have the standard Adobe icon. It used to work correctly on this system, but an update (either from Adobe or Microsoft) caused it to quit working. I have tried uninstalling and re-installing Adobe Reader 9.0.0. I have tried installing Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Pro Trial also, and neither worked although the Pro install temporarily made the problem worse.

Prior to installing the Pro Trial, I could cause the thumbnails to be generated by going into the Reader product, Selecting "File->Open", navigating to a directory, and choosing "Large Icons" from the file explorer widget. It would generate the thumbnails _inside_ the Reader product, and they would subsequently be available from the file explorer (for that directory). After the Pro Trial install, not even this worked anymore. I was able to return to the previous behavior starting a privileged command prompt and running regsvr32 on PDFPrevHndlr.dll and PDFShell.dll. Failure to use a privileged command shell will result in an 0x80070005 error when running DllRegisterServer. These two DLLs are obviously involved in the broken behavior. Another missing feature that I believe is clearly related is that the PDF tab is missing when you select "Properties" from the right-button context menu in File explorer.

My best guess is that there's a permissions problem on Windows Vista (perhaps only 64-bit) that prevents the installer from correctly registering the shell extensions, resulting in a complete absence of all file explorer related features. It would be really great if a moderator or someone from Adobe could acknowledge that there seems to be a problem here. I've tried reporting a bug, but I don't have high hopes that it will get noticed.

If you're experiencing a similar problem, please join in with a short comment and let's see if we can't identify whether this problem is Vista specific and/or 64-bit specific so that hopefully someday Adobe will fix it.