Adobe pdf crash errors.

My wife has had recurring problems with Adobe reader crashing on her Vista machine. Our fix a year ago was to roll back to version 7 after version 8 was released, and at the time an extensive web search didn't reveal any other reliable fixes.

So when version 9 upgraded, I finally decided to attempt a fix, since this would be the second upgrade we were skipping. I did another web search, and Adobe is claiming that an upgrade to 9.2 is fixing this problem. I don't know about everyone else, but it didn't.

My search was returning sysadmins who were saying that they just quit using adobe and started using some other 3rd party pdf reader because they couldn't resolve the problem.

So, after hitting a page about 7-8 links down, I finally found this fix about halfway down the page on http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404597.html from user ATATKD:

I changed the HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/UserShellFolders AppData key value from %USERPROFILE%\Application Data to %USERPROFILE%\AppData .

Seriously, a REGISTRY edit?

I tried changing all the folder permissions, and nothing worked. I tried deleting and performing a clean install, nothing worked.

I'm used to screwing around in the regsitry of my winmophos so, I figured, what the heck? I backed up the registry, changed the above mentioned key value, and !viola! it worked. So my question is- Why can't adobe fix this in their code?