This problem lies in the fact that Acrobat for some reason has a problem reading or writing to a file on a network share. Since the user’s home drive is connected to the network share, Acrobat will crash every time they try to open a file. Log in with a local user account and everything works great. After figuring out where the problem lay, I found a posting on the Adobe Forums about this exact issue.

What I found there was the following:

1. Log in as a Network User
2. Go to /Users/Shared/
3. If you are on an Intel based Mac create a folder in /Users/Shared/ named 9.0_x86 if you are on a Mac that is a G5/G4 create a folder named 9.0_ppc

At this point you should have created either
/Users/Shared/9.0_x86/
/Users/Shared/9.0_ppc/

4. Go to ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat/ and trash the 9.0_x86 or 9.0_ppc folder contained within
5. Go to Applications/Utilities/ and open Terminal
6. Enter one of the following into the Terminal
If you are on an Intel based Mac enter
ln -s /Users/Shared/9.0_x86 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Acrobat/9.0_x86
If you are on a G5/G4 Mac enter
ln -s /Users/Shared/9.0_ppc ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Acrobat/9.0_ppc
7. Open up Acrobat 9 and it should work!

*bold is my edit*

I found for the link command (ln) I had to actually specify the 9.0 folder. You are basically telling the computer to go to a local directory when it tries to find the user’s files in the home directory which is on the network. I also had to chmod the /Users/Shared/9.0_ppc to 777 because I created the folder with an admin user and the normal user didn’t have rights to make changes. After doing this, it all worked!

As of this posting, it appears the problem still exists and has not been fixed by Adobe even though it has been a known issue for 7 months now.

One of the issues is logging on to the computer when home drives are assigned through the Active Directory profile. As a Domain Admin, when I would sign in I would get the message

The home folder for the user account is located on an AFP or SMB server

and it would not log me in. Upon trying again immediately, it would log me in and my home drive would be mapped just fine! I thought it was annoying but we could deal with it at first but when I had the user try to log in with an account that was not an admin they repeatedly got the error and were not able to log on at all.

A bit of searching led me to an Apple Discussion Forum where I saw that an edit of one file /etc/hostconfig would help. The change is

AUTOMOUNT=-NO-

changing from the YES that is currently in the file. I’m not clear on the exact cause of this but it is definitely a bug. Well, now it works so that part is down. More issues later.