I’ve noticed that my older laptop running Windows XP has gotten much slower when browsing files in Windows Explorer.

I did some research and found that every time I did anything within the Windows Explorer shell, a process called AcrobatInfo.exe was firing up, eating up system resources, and just generally slowing things down. The result was a lag of about 2 seconds whenever I moved my mouse over any document – not just PDF files. Any document whatsoever.

Seems that Adobe snuck this AcrobatInfo.exe file into one of its automatic updates, without asking. It slows down my whole computer. It runs when I’m not even using PDF files. If you delete the file, it magically comes back. Adobe doesn’t care that this thing is hosing up my whole computer, and that I don’t want it. If any other company did this it’d be termed malware or a virus. But because it’s Adobe, they somehow get a free pass.

This thing is a pain in the butt to get rid of, too. Thankfully, I found a step by step guide here.

In relevant part, you need to delete the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components\21C0FC0AB3C24344FB30C34266AA5E09]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{98D9A6F1-4696-4B5E-A2E8-36B3F9C1E12C}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\AcrobatInfo.exe]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy\{AC76BA86-1033-0000-7760-000000000002}]

Change the value of these keys to false:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\AcroExch.Document]
“BrowseInPlace”=-
[ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\AcroExch.Document.7]
“BrowseInPlace”=-

And unregister the shell extension “service”

regsvr32 pathTo\pdfshell.dll /u

For me, the path to the PDFshell.dll file was :

regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\pdfshell.dll”