I wanted to post this publicly in case others start seeing weird freezing issues when patching Acrobat Pro, maybe we can share information. I've been patching the app now for almost a year and have only seen freezing issue on 2 machines, but it is very frustrating to troubleshoot as it freezes the whole machine. It appears to be more of an Adobe issue than a Symantec issue, but it presents itself during the Symantec patch cycle.
First time I saw this was a few months ago my boss' computer was freezing every hour or so, to the point that task manager wouldn't launch and his only recourse was to power off his PC. Because it seemed to be happening on a schedule, I thought immediately about patch and that I had sent out an Adobe Acrobat DC Pro and Reader bulletin that day. I disabled the update, and his freezing stopped.
The rest of our production fleet upgraded the same patch via Patch Management without issue, so we wrote it off to a corrupted install and/or some specialized software that is running on his machine. Reader had patched OK, it was Acrobat DC that was causing issues.
When I was able to get his machine in front of me, here are some troubleshooting steps I took on his machine
- I logged in locally and left all other programs closed and ran the updater manually out of C:\Program Files\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Agents\SoftwareManagement\Software Delivery\{guid}\cache. If you aren't familiar with this folder, it's where Symantec stores all software you push. To easily find the updater - sort by most recent, if it tried recently, it should be one of the top.
- This replicated the freezing problem so I knew for sure it was the root of the issue
- User had tried uninstall of Acrobat, but it hadn't fixed the issue. I forget at this point if it showed up under add/remove programs by the time I got the machine in my hands.
- I downloaded the Acrobat cleaner tool available here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/acrobatcleaner.html which reported it removed Acrobat.
- I then used CMS to repush our enterprise Acrobat installer, it finished without issue and installed the latest patch without issue. He has since received the next few Acrobat DC patches without issue.
The next 2-3 months of Acrobat patches went by without anyone complaining about freezing, so we thought it was a one off issue on boss' machine. That ended this week, when I was testing latest patches for July 2016, including the latest Acrobat and Reader DC patches, and my machine freezes up - I had to power off the machine to continue working.
- Tried running patch manually and confirmed it was Acrobat DC patch again causing the problem. I also re-downloaded the Acrobat installer and confirmed same issue was happening (available from https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/acrobat-dc-downloads.html ). Running both installers without the silent switch confirmed that the installer had seen a previous install that failed or was hung. I got various errors about previous installs, needing to rollback, etc.
- I tried uninstalling and using the Adobe cleaner tool that had solved the issue for my boss' computer, it reported it removed the program from installed apps list in Windows, but, unfortunately, this time the computer continued to freeze when trying to reinstall Acrobat DC.
- When I ran the installers with the silent switch off, I could see it hanging on copying "acroservicesupdater.exe" shortly before the computer froze.
- This adobe thread talks about replacing 2 C++ .dll files for somewhat similar issue, but unfortunately didn't work for me - maybe will help someone else though https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1812402
- Finally I found if I went to %temp% and sorted by most recent, I found a msi.log file that pointed to this file location as one of the last things the installer touched - C:\Windows\Installer\$PatchCache$\Managed\68AB67CA3301FFFF7706C0F070E41400\15.7.20033\acroservicesupdater.exe. Took a chance and renamed this file to C:\Windows\Installer\$PatchCache$\Managed\68AB67CA3301FFFF7706C0F070E41400\15.7.20033\acroservicesupdaterOLD.exe and ran installer again and the acroservicesupdater.exe file regenerated and install worked, and Acrobat patched OK on next run.
If/when we see this issue again, I think the first thing I'll do is look at that msi.log file and see if renaming a file in the last referenced location helps. I'd love to crowd source solutions if anyone else runs into this issue.