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I’m not exactly sure how or when it started happening, but whenever I would try to save a document as an Acrobat PDF document (or try to print to the Acrobat PDF printer), it would create the PDF document fine but leave me with errors in the printer queue that said it had failed to print. Deleting these entries would get rid of the errors and the printer icon from your system tray – a minor hassle.

I didn’t bother to deal with it for a while since I could just cancel the errored out jobs in my printer queue and not worry about it since the PDF would still be created, however I figured I would finally figure out the problem and try to fix it. Of course, searching on Adobe’s website turned up nothing of relevance, and a few websites I found just said to re-install the Adobe Acrobat PDF printer which was what I figured I should do anyways, so I did.

From what I can gather, the problem may have been started when a new version of Adobe Acrobat got installed. During the process of re-installing the Adobe Acrobat PDF printer, I noticed that my system had two versions of the Acrobat PDF printer drivers; one for version 6, one for version 8. I’m guessing this also causes problems when you try to add a new Adobe PDF port; when trying to do this, it never allows you to actually add it – I’m guessing it’s confused as to which version of the driver it should pick and install.

So what I did to fix this was I deleted the Acrobat PDF printer from my system and made sure I had no Acrobat PDF ports installed (in Windows Vista, right click in the printers folder and select “Run As Administrator -> Server Properties” to add/delete ports). Once I had done that I added a new local printer and created a new port – but I did not select “Adobe PDF Port” since this would not work for me. Instead I picked “Local Port” and named it “Adobe PDF” (I don’t think the name of the port matters, however the name of the printer does). I then selected to use the Adobe Acrobat PDF v8 printer drivers and named the printer “Adobe PDF” which is required otherwise using “Save As” will not work in suites like Microsoft Office. When it was all done I went in to the printer properties and changed it to print directly to the printer (under the “Advanced” tab).

Now saving as an Acrobat PDF document or printing to the printer works just as it did before but without generating any errors that get stuck in your printer queue! As to how you’re supposed to properly remove the older Adobe Acrobat PDF v6 printer drivers from your system, I do not yet know – but leaving them there seems to cause no ill effects.