On Tue, 31 Mar 2009, Craig Moore wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 10:26 -0400, W. J. Kossler wrote:
>> I have had system freezes, but am not running a server or
>> bonding. It is a sl5.2 x86_64 system.  I noticed that acroread
>> was running, though it should not have been and was using
>> ever increasing cpu percentage as the system proceeded to freeze. I've
>> made a soft link to evince from where acroread would normally be called,
>> and haven't had a freeze yet.
>
> I constantly have this problem. I have to run:
>
> $ ps -e | grep acroread
>
> to get the pid number and then
>
> $ kill -KILL <pid>

you could use "killall acroread" but that just avoids manaully looking up 
the pid...

> to kill the process. I figured it was an acrobat problem rather than SL.
> It mostly happens whenever I run acrobat from inside firefox. If I
> navigate way from the page where the pdf file is, the acroread process
> continues running and eventually freezes my system. This is especially
> true if I try to open two pdf files from inside firefox. I have to keep
> an eye on my activity indicator. If it starts showing lots of activity,
> then I know acroread is running in the background and its time to start
> killing.
>
> Maybe someone else has a less brute force method of dealing with this?

Possibly not what you want to hear, but we found that the acroread plugin 
was the cause of a significant number of firefox (and seamonkey/mozilla 
before that) crashes, so we simply stopped installing the plugin...

I can't remember if we even tweak things to make acroread the default pdf 
viewer or just let the default gnome options take effect - which will 
probably launch something horrid like evince ... :-)

  -- Jon