Adobe Acrobat X toolbar in IE8 - Get rid of it on terminal server!

You have Acrobat X Pro installed in a TS environment and when anyone opens IE, they see the Acrobat toolbar.  That’s fine if everyone who accesses the server is supposed to get access to Acrobat and all of its plug-ins, add-ons, etc… 

I found a user registry setting that I <thought> would take of the issue for me:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\10.0\Settings]

"IEToolbarIsVisible"=dword:00000001

I thought setting this to 0 would take care of this, but unfortunately it did not work for me as the value kept resetting to 1 any time I reopened the web browser.

To get rid of this toolbar, this is the registry value to delete (export it if you think you may need to restore it for any reason in the future).

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar]

"{47833539-D0C5-4125-9FA8-0819E2EAAC93}"=hex:00           ß Delete!

How did I find this?  I took a look at the properties for the Adobe PDF Add-on.  Searched for its Class ID and figured I’d do a search and destroy.

So far, no negative impact…

Adobe Acrobat Pro and Reader on the same Terminal Server (Citrix XenApp)

The environment I currently work in needed to make Adobe Acrobat Pro available to users in our Citrix XenApp environment due to the big push we have for telework.  Here are steps that can be taken to make this happen so that users who are not licensed for Adobe Acrobat Pro are not able to use it and that Adobe Reader remains the default pdf reader on the server.
Notes:  Installed on a Windows 2008 x64 server running Citrix XenApp 5 
                Transforms file was created using Adobe Customization Wizard

-          Install Adobe Reader X Pro (in install mode, of course) using a manual or automated method and using a transforms file as an argument.  For instance:

msiexec /qn /norestart /i "d:\install\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat X\AcroPro.msi" TRANSFORMS="d:\install\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat X\AcrobatX10.mst"

-          Create a security group that will contain the user accounts of people you want to provide Acrobat Pro access to.  Set NTFS permissions on Acrobat.exe and Acrotray.exe so that it will not be executable except for this group.

-          Publish it as an application to the group you created via CAMC in the step above.  If you are publishing a desktop, add the icon for it via a script, group policy preferences or some desktop management software, assuming you have one (like triCerat Simplify, etc...).

-          Set the registry for users who log on to have Adobe Reader as their default pdf reader.  You can do this by importing a reg file via a script, group policy preferences or using profile management software.  Here are the keys/values to set:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.pdf\OpenWithList]

"a"="AcroRd32.exe"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.pdf\UserChoice]

"Progid"="Applications\\AcroRd32.exe"

In my case, I wrote a quick batch file that I use as a startup script in AD that installs the application using msiexec.exe and sets permissions using xcacls.vbs.  I am using desktop management software to “publish” the icon to user desktops and set their default pdf reader.

Hello World

Hey folks - I am a system engineer whose primary focus is MS Terminal Services and desktop virtualization.  The primary purpose of this blog is to record some solutions that I have come up with while working out issues in various environments and with different products (the bulk of which will be MS and Citrix).  Here's to hoping I can keep it up to date!!