bandtank

Of course, after I go through the trouble to finally post this, I fixed it. The icon in ProgramData (#4 from above) was wrong, so I decided to delete it to see what would happen. I opened a PDF file and the icon changed to a PDF icon, not the Acrobat icon, which was progress, but still not quite right. I right clicked on the PDF icon in the taskbar, enabled pin to Taskbar for Acrobat, and then the icon was finally correct. Hopefully this helps someone.

Some more pictures: 1) the file association is correct 2) right click the taskbar icon -> properties 3) opening a PDF file shows the right icon at the top left corner (this can be changed on purpose to demonstrate that the issue isn't related) 4) the shortcut in program data\microsoft\windows\start menu\programs (the value of the location field in the programs right click -> properties) 5) searching for acrobat in the start menu

There have been multiple threads on this with no resolution that I've seen. As an aside, it was also suggested in one thread that Adobe software is malware and the cause of the issue, which is incorrect. This happens in a virtual machine that has never been connected to the internet and I installed PDN and Acrobat Pro X from known good sources. This also isn't a file association issue as all files open in the expected programs. I already reinstalled Acrobat Pro X, uninstalled paint.net, and the problem persists. Any time Acrobat is opened, the icon is the PDN icon instead of what it should be as seen in the picture below. This happened after I updated PDN about two months ago and it persists after updating to 4.0.12.