Warning messages about PDFMaker after installing SP2 for Office XP

Problem

You install Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Office XP. Afterwards, when you start PowerPoint you see the following message:

Microsoft PowerPoint has detected that your computer has a version of Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker that is known to cause instabilities in PowerPoint 2002. You can download a free update that fixes the problem from Adobe's web site.

Solution

If you have Acrobat 5, download and install the free update to Acrobat 5.05

If you have an earlier version of Acrobat or can't install the update for some reason, learn more about the problem here. This article explains how to disable Acrobat PDFMaker so you no longer see this warning message.

If your version of Acrobat works OK and you need to use PDFMaker, you can re-enable it as needed or leave it enabled and simply ignore this warning message.

Another possible workaround: Use a "touch" utility to change the date of the PDFMaker add-ins to something later than 9/1/2001

Why it happens
After SP2 is installed, Office apps check for the presence of Acrobat 5 (the original release of Acrobat) or earlier. The version of PDFMaker in Acrobat releases prior to 5.0.5 can cause Office apps to crash.

Office XP SP2 checks for PDFMaker add-ins with a file date of 9/1/2001. If it's older than that, you see the alert message.

This is Microsoft's way of letting you know that there's a free update which will solve the problem.

Learn more about it here where you'll also find a link to the update page at Adobe's site.

You'll never see this message if you only have the free Reader software installed; it only occurs if you have the full commercial Acrobat.

Search terms:acrobat,pdfmaker,add-in,SP2,XP,2002

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