The latest versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader have seemed to have introduced an annoying bug. When you open a PDF attachment from Microsoft Outlook 2003 after about 5 seconds an error appears and closes Acrobat Reader.

“Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Error!” or some variation of it.

The problem is associated with folder redirection in the user profile. In the basic testing I did it seemed to fail if any folder was redirected.

If you were launching Adobe Acrobat Reader manually it worked fine.

A bit of quick research will point you to the Adobe knowledge base, here is the link. The solution from Adobe is to update to version 9.1 of the reader, unfortunately this does not work.

The only option right now is to not have folder redirection enabled. For me that is not such a big deal as my XenApp 5.0 environment is a clean one, but I can see this being an issue for other people.

If you have another solution to this issue, let me know.

(Update #1)

After a week of investigation I came across the real reason I was getting the runtime error message. We are predominantly a Windows Server 2003 and XP environment still. The existing terminal services profiles are 2003/XP profiles. There are some subtle differences between the profiles, in particular in the user shell folders.

In my new Windows 2008 environment I was using Citrix Profile manager to allow us to move away from the terminal services profile and the issues that you can have.  But if you did not already have a Citrix Profile manager profile it would still initially import some settings from the roaming profile.

This is what a normal default 2003/XP User Shell Folder settings would look like.

Here is what the default Vista/7/2008 User Shell Folder would look like. Note that I have added some redirection to the H: drive.

If you had the old XP profile settings on the Windows 2008 server you would get the Run Time error from Acrobat reader when launching a pdf attachment out of Outlook.

A strange and annoying issue, but it certainly makes you understand why you should not try and run roaming profiles between 2003 and 2008 server systems.