Problem with print preview

[MichaelL65]

Once would be a fluke, but this has happened twice.

When selecting Print Preview; if I have Adobe Acrobat selected as the printer, the computer locks up so badly that I do not even get a blue screen of death. Pressing Ctr-Alt-Del takes nearly 10 minutes to respond, and will not go any further. Never even get a report on the error (xyz.exe has caused a abc fault at nnn memory location or anything of that sort).

The lock-up happens when I click on the OK button from the Print Preview dialog box with Adobe Acrobat Distiller (ver. 5) as the selected printer.

The second time it happened, I lost data thanks to Windows deciding it was too busy to actually save the file when I told it to (some days Linux starts to look really good). Fortunately it was only the comment data that was lost (and because I had save under a new filename frequently, was able to recover most of that).

But I thought it was worth mentioning. Both for those who hunt bugs and other users who use Acrobat. 

[Greg]

Thanks MichaelL65 for the report, however, I use Adobe Acrobat Distiller v5.0 as well, and have for years and I've never had it crash DirectSOFT, or the PC.

Usually, when weird stuff like this happens it is a printer-driver issue. You might try to uninstall/reinstall Adobe.

But, I've also learned, like you, that just because it works on one Winders PC it still might not work on another.

[BobO]

Oh the wonders of Winders and Adobe...

Greg speaks the truth regarding troubles with print drivers. That's one of the difficult things we deal with at times...drivers...comm, printer, video, etc. Windows does a very admirable job of abstracting devices; in most cases things just work. But occasionally, you have those 'other' cases.

"On Ed's Win98 machine, on Tuesday, following use of Wordstar for DOS Pro, DirectSoft causes a core dump...". Yuk. Sometimes you can do something about it, and sometimes you can't. If we can duplicate it reliably we stand a better chance, but even then not always. Between our code and the device are many, many layers we don't control.

About 1 in 10 times when I run the Acrobat reader from within Internet Explorer, it locks hard. I can usually be patient and get the process killed...but I have been near violence a time or two waiting to get control back.

Yeah, at times Linux does look nice...

[MichaelL65]

Could also be my choice of anti-virus software, I suppose.

Sort of afraid to even try it again. Maybe after I get this project done I can try re-installing Acrobat.

[BobO]

Yeah, A/V software is another one that has been known to cause trouble. Generally related to installs, but certainly not limited to that...