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.

Hmmm, I’d seen this before but couldn’t remember why. I searched online and found references to the routing table being configured incorrectly. I played around with mine but just ended up messing things up because it was already looking good. So then I took the same network cable and plugged it back into my first xbox which I have been using for months now. I could ping it. Plug it back into the second and it can get to the internet to download new skins for the dashboard. Hmmm what is the problem? I SSHed into one of my servers and pinged it from there successfully. Something between my laptop and the xbox.

I finally started looking at some of the settings on my wireless access point to see if something in there could possibly be messing me up. After trying some settings that I really didn’t expect to work I blindly clicked my way into the page that restricts computers on the network. I’d completely forgotten about it. See — I used to have this access point acting as my router so I had it restrict people from being on my network by MAC address. This meant that if a friend came over I would have to enter their MAC address before they could gain access. The thinking is even if they got past my wireless security code, the access point would not let them access the network because their MAC address did not match one on the list. Just one more step to throw off casual wireless snoopers.

When I moved to using IPCop for my router I just turned off the routing features of the access point and used it for a simple access point to the rest of my network from my laptop. The only thing is any computer that I want to connect to via wireless now has to be added to the MAC address filter. Since the access point is not between any of the computers on the network but mine it won’t affect any non-wireless computers (i.e. my servers) but will still affect me. Sometimes it’s the little things you forget.

I do end up learning something from these things. This time I decided to fire up tcpdump to see what was happening when my computer asked the network for the address I knew existed. It still took me a while but now I am not afraid to use tcpdump again for any future problems.