For the last several years, Acrobat Reader has drifted between sluggish and mind-bogglingly slow, particularly when starting up. Acrobat is a great tool and PDF files widespread enough to make the reader software a requirement on any system. So why is it so dang slow?

There are tools to speed up Reader and articles describing methods to do this by hand.

The tip that worked for me was described at ArsGeek: remove or rename accessibility.api from %Program Files%\Adobe\Reader 8.0\reader\plug_ins.

Now Adobe Reader opens nice and fast. This is no slouch of an improvement, either; the gain is from about 10 or 20 seconds down to 1 or 2 seconds.