this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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Adobe has no scruples.
I used to work for a full-disk encryption vendor in the 2000s, and one customer had an issue where the machine would BSOD sometimes if both our product and Adobe Acrobat were installed. It seemed a mystery or just a red herring - what on Earth did Acrobat do that could trigger a kernel-mode crash?
Turned out that every hour or so, Acrobat would be reading and writing back the master boot record (containing the OS bootstrap code and partition table) on the primary hard drive. The bug was ours (to unlock the hard drive keys at boot we had to put different data there and redirect I/O after Windows started, and this redirection code would crash once in a blue moon), but Adobe has no business mucking about with this extremely sensitive data.
That is bananas. What was Acrobat doing with the MBR?
I suspect it was part of some stupid copy protection scheme.