I agree with Bear... there's something happening there for which the facts are not yet in evidence.
I've had trouble with Adobe products in the past... and then there was that Acrobat version a couple years ago that was pretty close to being a virus itself... but by and large it shouldn't be *that* bad.
Well, in the registry, for the .exe extension there was an "application" setting that was set to the adobe acrobat program. Once I removed that stuff started working again.