So I provide free tech support for the place my (soon to be ex-I wife works, and today I found and fixed an interesting bug involving Adobe's Acrobat Reader. The problem was that the Acrobat Reader would show its splash screen and then freeze, taking 100% of the CPU. There were a few other programs on the machine which had also started to take a really long time to start, but none were as bad as Adobe. No amount of reinstalling seemed to help. I did some online research and found not a whole lot. So I turned to SysInternals. I used Process Explorer and didn't see anything, so I went back online. I found a site mention that Adobe used temporary files. So I checked the Local System Temp directory and found a big surprise, over 66,000 zero-byte temp files! Now, if memory serves, you shouldn't have more than 65,000 files in a single directory. I removed all of the temp files and now Adobe and all the other programs are happy. It seems like Adobe can get into a state where it doesn't clean up after itself. If this goes unchecked, problems can occur which can affect other software. FYI, keep your temp directories clean!
-- Matt Ranlett