Expert: Ken Black - 4/21/2009

Question
Hi!

I uninstalled Adobe Reader 9 (as well as the other Acrobat programs that come w/ it). The uninstall was "successful," there there seems to still be a lot of adobe files on my pc in programs files and in my documents file... I think I saw some in the registry, too. Is it okay to leave them there? Do I need to manually delete them before trying to install a new reader (maybe Foxit - don't want adobe). Some of them are "read only" files(I think that's the phrase I want)  and I didn't see any way of removing them.

I tried opening the windows clean up utility, but since I already uninstalled Adobe, it wasn't listed.

Thanks!

Answer
The "Adobe" files that you are referring to, are most likely pdf files (portable document format) that can be read by any pdf reader. They likely are identifying with Adobe Acrobat Reader because pdf is a file format owned by Adobe Systems.

As for the registry entries, you should have no problems installing and using a third-party pdf reader. The entries are likely old and should have no effect on your system. If you are experiencing problems, you may want to clean your registry using a utility that removes old unused entries.

Thanks,

Ken Black

www.bestprintingonline.com