April 27th 2006 02:34 am
Adobe and Acrobat Reader
As I mentioned before, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader has issues with DEP.
At that point, I was running as Administrator, which I’m no-longer doing. (Try it, it really does work if you know what you’re doing.. yeah, I know, that’s the wrong way around, limited accounts should be for those who don’t know what’s going on).
Installers for some applications say things like “This installer must be run as administrator.”, or “This may not work unless run as administrator.”, it turns out that most of them are lying. The ones that won’t attempt run can normally be attacked with great tools like Jared Breland’s Universal Extractor.
Adobe, being the great company that they are, have decided to take a different approach. Running the Acrobat Reader (7.07) setup file as non-admin gives you the incredibly useful error message:
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FEAD® 2.5 Optimizer©
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Access is denied.
File: C:/Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat 7.0/Setup Files/RdrBig707/ENU
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OK
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Good work, guys.
Even better, trying to unpack the setup file manually suggests that they’ve used a “modified” version of UPX (new version released recently, btw). I wonder where the (GPL) source for it is?
Note: RyanVM’s alternate installer also (apparently) fails, but silently.
Update!
RyanVM’s alternate installer, while not working by itself, seems to be in a format that WinRAR can extract. Opening up the archive gives a resonably sane directory structure, from which you can just extract the “reader” folder, and everything seemingly works fine… not sure what all of those other files are for, as they’re clearly not required.
5 Comments »
Zbeynex on 30 Apr 2006 at 5:06 am #
Yarr!
Keffo on 21 Oct 2006 at 6:45 pm #
I think I left my shoe here..?
cosette on 26 Jan 2007 at 2:28 pm #
Help! I’m trying to downlaod a printer driver and this window pops up saying FEAD 2.5 optimizer. how do I get rid of the thing?
Faux’s Blog » Blog Archive » Vista! on 23 Mar 2007 at 2:35 am #
[...] The “official” OpenSSL binaries use an old version of MSVCR71.dll, which I didn’t feel like installing (I’m sure I’ll pick it up when I install some crap later), building them is easy: perl Configure –openssldir=c:/openssl VC-WIN32 msdo_masm nmake -f msntdll.mak nmake -f msntdll.mak test nmake -f msntdll.mak install [...]
Garry on 10 Apr 2007 at 9:27 pm #
I did not get enough information from the comments here. I need to know if the 2.5 Adobe Optimizer can be terminated and if so how. If not do I go back to an earlier version of Adobe? Thank you