TechNote

Adobe Acrobat opens when starting Livecycle Designer (8.x on Windows)

Issue

When you start Adobe Livecycle Designer 8.0 as installed with Adobe Acrobat 8.0 professional, Livecycle Designer opens, immediately closes and Acrobat opens.

Reason

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional was installed as a trial and was removed.

Solution

Remove registry values.

Disclaimer: This procedure involves editing the registry. Adobe doesn't provide support for editing the registry, which contains critical system and application information. Make sure to back up the registry before modifying it. For more information about the registry, refer to Windows Help.

To back up the registry and then remove registry values:

Open RegEdit.
- On Windows XP, go to Start > Run, type in regedit and click OK.
- On Windows Vista, go to the Start menu, type in regedit in the Search field and double-click on regedit.exe
Choose File > Export.
Select Local Disk C for the Save in: location.
Type backup for File Name.
Choose All for the Export Range.
Click Save.
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Designer\8.0.
Right-click on the MasterApp value and choose Delete.
Right-click on the MasterKey value and choose Delete.
Exit regedit.

Also, what would be recommended, is that customers upgrade to Acrobat 9 which no longer exhibits the unexpected behavior.

Additional Information

When Acrobat is installed as a trial, special registry entries are installed with Livecycle Designer. When the trial is removed, those entries remain even after Acrobat is reinstalled as a registered product. Removing them allows Livecycle Designer to start normally.