As many of you know I actually reloaded Vista on my day to day notebook – thanks to a most inopportune hard drive crash (When Disk Failures Attack!), and the lack of a bootable XP disk.

 

But I figured, “Hey, I’ll make the most of this and force myself to use Vista.”Arrg! Vista, you continue to curse me!

Adobe Acrobat 8 Install Error

Today’s vignette of pain stars, yet again, the loathsome and talent-less Vista User Access Control or UAC. Regular readers of the blog will recall my first bout with the UAC from Vista UAC – this is “trustworthy computing?” – And since turning off the UAC is the first order of business on any Vista build I do, you can imagine my surprise when I encountered the following error while attempting to install Adobe Acrobat 8.

 

Regardless of whether you’re installing the full version or just the reader, if you have turned UAC off, you get this dialog “The Temp folder is on a drive that is full or is inaccessible. Free up space on the drive or verify that you have write permission on the Temp folder.”

 

Now wait a minute… If I have turned off UAC, why on earth should I get a permission error – that’s what I discarded UAC for in the first place! It seams this is part of the new Vista UAC pseudo-privilege elevation strategy. It turns out that you must re-enable UAC, reboot and then install Acrobat in order to be successful.


 

I found a good source of information about this phenomena at Scott Hanselman’s site, click here for a direct link. Great post, and work arounds, just a damn shame this UAC thing keeps driving me to the brink of insanity and then some.