AboutCarolyn Meinel Expertise I cover Windows, Unix, TCP/IP and Ethernet security questions. I do not cover Mac, Palm Pilot, or other networking issues.
Experience Books by Carolyn Meinel: wrote a chapter for The Hacking of America book (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567204600/happyhacker)
My article Code Red for the Web for Scientific American was reprinted in the book Best American Science Writing 2002 (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060936509/happyhacker). My book The Happy Hacker: A Guide to Mostly Harmless Hacking is now in 4th edition with a Japanese edition (see http://happyhacker.org/hhbook/).
Question i have a adobe pdf 8.0 version. it always opened but now it doesn't , instead it asks me for a password? can you help me to open my pdf? i called adobe and they said the program has no security, so its my computer. i have windows 2000. any help.? thank you for your time
Answer I agree with you, your computer may well be infected with some sort of virus that messes up Adobe for you by password protecting documents. However, just in case your problem is that a friend is playing a joke on you by messing with your computer and putting a password on the document you try to open, here's how to find out what the password is: http://www.toggle.com/lv/group/view/kl34321/Adobe_Acrobat_Password_Recovery_Key....
If this doesn't work, then we must have a virus at work. If so, like some viruses, it also must have been designed to evade or disable your antivirus program.
Here's what will almost certainly work.
1) Download F-Secure's Complete Internet security suite, which offers a free thirty day trial: https://store.f-secure.com/cgi-bin/dlreg/ml=EN?ID=FSISTB&desid=TRIAL
2) Disconnect from the Internet.
3) Uninstall your current antivirus. This is absolutely essential because otherwise it and F-Secure will fight each other and might crash your computer. It isn't good enough to just turn off your old antivirus because it probably has been crippled by your virus infection.
4) Install F-Secure.
5) Run a complete scan of your computer. Follow any instructions F-Secure might give you.
6) Reboot and try opening Adobe.
If this works, you can either keep F-Secure or uininstall it and reinstall your old antivirus.
7) After this, if you decide you would rather keep your old antivirus, you can reinstall it and get all the latest updates right away. Usually antivirus companies are pretty good about updating their programs whenever some new virus figures out how to evade or cripple their product.
