In an somewhat unusal coincidence, I had earlier read this blog post about Adobe Acrobat Reader crashing on FurryGoat. It's about how people are taking interest in FoxIt Reader because of the instability of Adobe Acrobat Reader. About 5 minutes ago, Reader crashed on me trying to open a technical document from Intel. I had looked at the FoxIt Reader product briefly (before the crash) and am not interested -- even after the crash. For one thing, it's not free for commercial users. That's a big deal for me as I would be using it at work as well as home ($39).

After the crash, the Microsoft Crash Analysis page popped up with this:

Solution found: install the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader

Thank you for submitting an error report.

Problem description

The error was likely caused by:

Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader

Solution

Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader was created by Adobe Systems Incorporated. We have detected that you are running an older version of Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader. To prevent this problem from recurring, follow these steps:

Remove the old version of Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader using the Add/Remove Programs feature in the Control Panel.

Go to the Adobe Systems Incorporated website at Adobe Systems Incorporated and install the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader.

Note: Installing the latest version over the older version will not solve the problem; you must perform remove the older version before you install the newer version. If the problem persists, please contact Adobe Systems Incorporated and alert them of the problem.

Interesting. Just upgrading won't fix the issue. As a bonus, the text also includes a gramatical mistake: "you must perform remove the older version...." Eh?

As a side note, how many times have you waited for a PDF file to load, wondering why it's so slow, to find buried a "Update found" or "Check for updates?" dialog box buried somewhere on your desktop? Arrgh.

Anyway -- uninstalling, downloading the new version, and trying the exact same PDF now works fine.