PDF preview no longer works in Explorer or Outlook
The Adobe PDF preview handler crashes silently and falls back to generic icons. Sometimes an Office update breaks the registration.
Try this first
- 1Open Adobe Acrobat, Edit, Preferences, General, enable PDF Preview
- 2Repair the Acrobat install via Help, Repair Installation
- 3Or switch to Microsoft Edge as the default PDF handler
- 4Remove legacy PDF software that still claims the handler
When to bring us in
For Outlook-only crashes: create a new Outlook profile and test there.
See also
- My laptop is suddenly slowThree main suspects: a runaway background process, near-full disk, or a Windows update in progress.
- One specific application is slow for everyoneIf an app is slow for one person: local. For everyone at once: server side or vendor side.
- Opening files from the file server takes minutesOften the server itself is fine and the issue is network routing or stalling DNS resolution.
None of the above fits?
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