Over the past couple of months, when I've had a lot more time on my hands than I'd prefer, I've taken on such giants as Dell and Verizon, and have even taken a shot or two at the FBI, CIA and other government agencies that use acronyms to hide their activities. Today, my tirade is at Adobe.

An Adobe Reader is one of those things in a computer than technically challenged folks, like me, take for granted. It reads PDF files, whatever that means. In my case, I've been trying to download floor plans from a couple of upcoming shows, so for my purposes, PDF means Pretty Damned-Important Files.

My new computer either did not have Adobe Reader on it, or out of stupidity, I got rid of it without knowing it. If I remember correctly, all of my previous computers came equipped with that particular software.

Anyway, to read those Pretty Damned Important files, I had to download Adobe Reader. That in itself, a simple enough task for a dummy. Click on a button that says Download.

However, after the couple of minutes it takes, the Adobe Reader corrupted my whole system changing all of my icons to the Adobe Reader Icon, and stopped me from navigating to any place in my computer saying something about creating file associations in default settings and other things that leave my in a state of confusion.

My only solution was to uninstall the reader and everything went back to normal only I still had not read my Pretty Damned Important Files.

Over the course of two weeks, I repeated the above 6 or seven times, all with the same results.

Yesterday, I went to the Adobe.com website to seek help. There is no Help email link, only phone numbers with a $39 charge. I even tried sending an email to help@adobe.com and suppport@adobe.com  thinking surely one would go through. Both came back as Undeliverable. I give Adobe a very poor rating in customer care.

Finally, I posted my problems on one of Adobe's on line forums. An hour or so later, a very nice lady (Lynn Hudak) posted a reply stating she was having the same problems and that I was not alone.

A couple hours later, a gentleman posted a link to an Adobe site which addressed the problem specifically only it was written in computereze with things like "modifying registries" and "rebuilding Iconcaches" and such that just scared the bejesus out of me.

Finally, Lynn came back, said she had failed at the suggestions, and consulted with her son, apparently a geek like mine (@jasonfalls) and he directed her to Foxitsoftware.com. I did the same, downloaded Foxit and in less than a minute, was printing off my Pretty Damned Important Files.

So, Adobe is gone. Foxit is in. Thanks, Lynn and your son.