Let me start from the very beginning. We use Adobe Acrobat 5 in a windows 2003 terminal server environment. one and a half years, and never had a problem. till a few days ago when i ran microsoft update, and updated some components of office and windows on the system (most of these updates cannot be removed, by the way, i already tried that). after these updates, all terminal server users were still able to print to PDFs, but their document would stay in the Adobe PDF print queue even when it was completed. so at the end of the day i'd have 2000 documents in the queue, yet the printer was still working real-time, as in if i print something to it, it would pop the PDF out right away. I thought i'd just uninstall acrobat, so i uninstalled it, rebooted, and tried reinstalling. that's when i got the problem...
Before you ask, we HAVE to use Adobe PDFWriter (the 'custom' option when you install), because we use a product called Great Plains, which ONLY supports Adobe PDF, the distiller will not work with it. This is coming from Microsoft's mouth. Also, we use Adobe Acrobat 5, because it's by far the quickest version when creating PDF files from Great Plains. I've heard this from a lot of people, and have personally tried Adobe Acrobat 6 and 7 in a test environment with terrible results. Acrobat 5 works great for us, so that's what i'm sticking to.
The problem is this: I select 'custom' installation in the adobe acrobat 5 installation wizard, then check "Adobe PDFWriter", the only box that's not checked (done this installation so many times in the past it's like clockwork). however when i click 'next', i get an error that says:
"Acrobat PDF Writer requires a LPT1: printer port. Setup could not find this required port. The PDFWriter component will not be installed
To install PDFWriter, add a LPT1: port and run setup again"
the installation then continues, but it will not install Adobe PDFWriter files, which is what gives the "Adobe PDF" printer after installation, only the "Acrobat Distiller" or something like that, and that doesn't work with Great Plains (Great Plains has a button that says "Send to PDF". our employees use this button every couple of minutes, and we go through a couple hundred PDF documents a day at least. if PDFWriter isn't installed, the "Send to PDF" box is grayed out... it can't find the printer. so i need to install PDFWriter".
Any suggestions or help. unfortunately this is labor day, and i need it done by tomorrow at 6:00AM Central time, so this is pretty high priority.
I should also mention that the LPT1: port SHOWS UP in device manager, and under printers --> file --> server properties --> ports. it shows up there, and doesn't show anything to be using it. i've tried removing the LPT1: port, but i'm not able to. i'm sure that's not the problem though, since it does show up.
someone help plz!!! :(
