Closed Bug 714100 Opened 13 years ago Closed 8 years ago

Plugin Startup Crash @ acrobat.dll@0x13...

Categories

(Plugins Graveyard :: PDF (Adobe), defect)

Product:
Plugins Graveyard
Component:
PDF (Adobe)
Platform:
x86
Windows 7
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
critical

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: marcia, Assigned: bugs)

References

Details

(Keywords: crash)

Crash Data

Seen while looking at 9.0.1 crash stats. https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/list?signature=acrobat.dll@0x13b519. Signature summary indicates it happened all throughout the 9.0 betas on Windows. Looks to be that it is happening with 9.0.0.332 of acrobat.

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/b5594aef-3830-478c-b33b-1e58a2111227

Frame 	Module 	Signature [Expand] 	Source
0 	KERNELBASE.dll 	RaiseException 	
1 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x13b519 	
2 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x8ec176 	
3 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x185020 	
4 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x151c3f 	
5 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x151c3f 	
6 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x151c3f 	
7 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x151c3f 	
8 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x151c3f 	
9 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x9a3c1e 	
10 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0xc6cd 	
11 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0xe7b04f 	
12 	KERNELBASE.dll 	NlsValidateLocale 	
13 	Acrobat.dll 	Acrobat.dll@0x8eaa61
acrobat.dll@0x13b519|0xc06d007e / 0x00000000 (46 crashes)
    100% (46/46) vs.   0% (74/20568) Acrobat.dll
        100% (46/46) vs.   0% (56/20568) 9.0.0.332
          0% (0/46) vs.   0% (10/20568) 9.2.0.124
          0% (0/46) vs.   0% (1/20568) 9.3.0.148
          0% (0/46) vs.   0% (3/20568) 9.3.2.163
          0% (0/46) vs.   0% (4/20568) 9.4.6.252
Latest version of Acrobat is Adobe Reader X 10.1.1. This suggests users are running very out of date versions which may need blocklisting. Acrobat 9.0 goes back to Q4'2008 (3 years old).
Acrobat and Adobe Reader are two different applications, the first one is paying and the second one is free of charge.
I don't know if users of Acrobat 9.0 must pay a new license to use Acrobat 9.4 where it's fixed.

It's #20 top crasher in 9.0.1.
Keywords: topcrash
And we are 100% sure the DLL in this crash is from Adobe Acrobat, not Adobe Reader?

FWIW, both Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat are on version 10 now; version 9.* of either product is out of date.
(In reply to Anthony Hughes, Mozilla QA (irc: ashughes) from comment #4)
> And we are 100% sure the DLL in this crash is from Adobe Acrobat, not Adobe
> Reader?
I have Adobe Reader X installed on my PC and no acrobat.dll.

> version 9.* of either product is out of date.
Acrobat 9.x is still supported (see http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/837/cpsid_83708.html), so the issue is probably caused by corporate users who haven't upgraded.
Do we have a PDF that triggers this crash? I wouldn't expect this to be a crash on startup (unless recovering from an earlier crash and tabs are getting reloaded with the bad PDF.)
Keywords: needURLs
I added crash signatures for different Acrobat versions.
It also happen with Acrobat 9.4 according to correlations:
  acrobat.dll@0x13d8ac|0xc06d007e / 0x00000000 (19 crashes)
    100% (19/19) vs.   1% (692/51702) Acrobat.dll
        100% (19/19) vs.   0% (20/51702) 9.4.0.195
          0% (0/19) vs.   0% (6/51702) 9.4.6.252

More reports at:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/query/query?product=Firefox&version=ALL%3AALL&range_value=4&range_unit=weeks&query_search=signature&query_type=startswith&query=acrobat.dll%400x13&reason=&build_id=&process_type=any&hang_type=any&do_query=1
I added crash signatures for different Acrobat versions.
It also happen with Acrobat 9.4 according to correlations:
  acrobat.dll@0x13d8ac|0xc06d007e / 0x00000000 (19 crashes)
    100% (19/19) vs.   1% (692/51702) Acrobat.dll
        100% (19/19) vs.   0% (20/51702) 9.4.0.195
          0% (0/19) vs.   0% (6/51702) 9.4.6.252

More reports at:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/query/query?product=Firefox&version=ALL%3AALL&range_value=4&range_unit=weeks&query_search=signature&query_type=startswith&query=acrobat.dll%400x13&reason=&build_id=&process_type=any&hang_type=any&do_query=1
Crash Signature: [@ acrobat.dll@0x13b519 ] → [@ acrobat.dll@0x13b519] [@ acrobat.dll@0x13cadf] [@ acrobat.dll@0x13cb56] [@ acrobat.dll@0x13d8ac] [@ acrobat.dll@0x13de8d] [@ acrobat.dll@0x13d92e] [@ acrobat.dll@0x13eb84]
Summary: Firefox Startup Crash [@ acrobat.dll@0x13b519 ] → Firefox Startup Crash @ acrobat.dll@0x13...
The largest volume crash seems to correlate to Version 9.0.0.332 - Jet can you help get us that old version to test with?
1/5/2012: Sent a note to Adobe requesting assistance.
BTW: In the crash report in Comment 0 and in the crash report from the duplicate bug the version of acrobat.dll is different from the nppdf32.dll version. So maybe there's some old version of Acrobat still hidden somewhere and the newer plugin tries to use it (and then fails)? But I'm not really sure about that, Adobe should know better :)
Eh, should read the whole bug first. So maybe the users have Adobe Reader X installed, Firefox tries to use the plugin (on startup?) and the plugin then tries to "access" the old acrobat.dll in some way that causes the crash.
This is not a Firefox startup crash. This is a plugin crash which happens early in the start of the plugin process. The user should be experiencing the frowny-face plugin icon, but their Firefox is still alive.
Tracking for Firefox 10/11 and assigning to Jet to follow up with Adobe.
Assignee: nobody → jet
tracking-firefox10: --- → +
tracking-firefox11: --- → +
I downloaded the trial version of Acrobat Pro and have not been able to reproduce the crash. I am fairly certain if we get the version requested in Comment 10 that we or Adobe will be able to repro.
Keywords: needURLs
Frank W is correct as far as I can tell: nppdf32.dll is 10.1.1 (the latest) but Acrobat is 9.0.0 (for which there are probably more than 20 subsequent updates). This almost certainly means that the user has upgraded to Reader 10.1.1, which updates the browser plug-in as well, but still has Acrobat 9.0.0 and their setting is to use Acrobat in the browser (updating Reader does not change this).

The browser plug-in (nppdf32.dll) is designed to be interoperable with previous versions of Acrobat, but we can't test every single patch so we test just the latest few (this would be Acrobat 9.4.x with nppdf32.dll 10.1.1).  It's possible it's something incompatible between those two; the recent spike suggests one of two things:

* a lot of users recently upgraded Reader 10.1.1, and its nppdf32.dll is indeed incompatible with Acrobat 9.0.0.
* a lot of users recently upgraded to Firefox 9.0.1, and something in that is interfering with the nppdf32.dll 10.1.1 <-> Acrobat 9.0.0 interoperability.

I'm betting it's the former not the latter.

I can try this combination briefly but don't know how much development effort I can put into this.  The best thing would be to have users upgrade Acrobat, or switch to using Reader in the browser: Reader 10.1.1 can do this from its Preferences dialog.  Preferences -> General -> Set Default PDF Handler.

I discussed this issue briefly with the mozilla plug-in engineers some time ago, noting that there was the possiblility of an up-to-date browser plug-in talking to an obsolete Acrobat or Reader version.  To find that out, they'd have to look at registry items we install and maintain, and they were (understandably) reluctant to do that.

I'm trying to raise this issue with our management but don't know what success I'll have.
(In reply to Rudi Sherry from comment #18)
> I'm trying to raise this issue with our management but don't know what
> success I'll have.

Thanks for raising this issue with management, Rudi. If this continues to affect our users significantly, we'll have to consider blocklisting the plugin DLL for Firefox 10. This is highly undesirable given the fact that this appears to only occur in combination with certain versions Adobe Reader, but I'm not sure what other recourse we'd have in the 10 timeframe.
It's not clear to me why we'd bother blocklisting the DLL: the acrobat plugin would still not function, at least for the users who are experiencing this issue, and it's no worse for anyone in this configuration.
Hi,
I desinstalled the Acrobate Reader program and reinstalled it and it works again now!
As the problem is know solved for me at least, please, remove me from this thread.
Best, thanks and good luck!
(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #20)
> It's not clear to me why we'd bother blocklisting the DLL: the acrobat
> plugin would still not function, at least for the users who are experiencing
> this issue, and it's no worse for anyone in this configuration.

I'm exploring our options, and trying to address the worst case scenario where a user is getting a startup each time they launch the browser. Are we certain that this scenario is not playing out, or is a rare occurrence?
As noted in comment 15, Firefox is not crashing. Only the plugin process is crashing. It's possible that for some set of users Acrobat is crashing every time they try to view a PDF, which would explain why this has spiked so high, but I don't think that blacklisting the plugin or the DLL would be a better user experience than leaving things the way they are currently.
Summary: Firefox Startup Crash @ acrobat.dll@0x13... → Plugin Startup Crash @ acrobat.dll@0x13...
(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #23)
> As noted in comment 15, Firefox is not crashing. Only the plugin process is
> crashing.

Thanks bsmedberg - missed that important piece of info.
Workaround: I was able to solve this plugin crash on my PC (Windows XP SP3) by manually changing the program which is used to open PDFs. In my German Adobe Reader X v10.1.1 this settings are found at 'Bearbeiten > Voreinstellungen > Allgemein > Standard PDF-Programm auswählen' (something like ‘Edit > Options > General > Select default PDF program’ in English). Here I changed the settings for the program to use from 'Adobe Acrobat 9' to 'Adobe Reader X'. This restarted the Adobe Reader installer which rewrote the PDF associations on the system including those in FF. The only caveat is that one now has to explicitly open PDFs in Acrobat if I want to edit them. But I can live with this.
I did get the software and tried reproducing it on XP but so far have not been able to.

For people seeing the bug - did you only see the bug after updating from 8.0.1?

I did try switching the preferences around as Erich described in Comment 25 but that did not work. Also note that there is a newer version of Reader out 10.1.2 and I am wondering if that makes any difference as well in reproducing the bug.
No offense, but I wonder what you try to test here? It's known what causes the bug, Mozilla can't fix it. It's up to Adobe to fix it. We can only educate users to switch the default PDF program if this happens. Maybe there are differences when it crashes, depending on which Reader and Acrobat version is used. Not our business I would say :)
Adobe *has* fixed this, in one of the many subsequent patches to Acrobat 9. While the workaround is effective, we still think it would be better if the users applied the patch(es) than if they work around it by changing the default PDF handler.

Unfortunately, not all users apply those patches and we cannot force them.  Anything that helps them apply the patches will help everyone.
Frank: I was asked in the channel meeting to try to reproduce the crash, and that is why I did.

(In reply to Frank Wein [:mcsmurf] from comment #27)
> No offense, but I wonder what you try to test here? It's known what causes
> the bug, Mozilla can't fix it. It's up to Adobe to fix it. We can only
> educate users to switch the default PDF program if this happens. Maybe there
> are differences when it crashes, depending on which Reader and Acrobat
> version is used. Not our business I would say :)
(In reply to Rudi Sherry from comment #28)

I think the best Mozilla can do is educate users who may be experiencing this to update their version of Acrobat. Do we have an indication/proof of what versions "work"? Before we put up any sort of documentation we need to be sure what we are communicating is accurate.
(In reply to Anthony Hughes, Mozilla QA (irc: ashughes) from comment #30)
> Do we have an indication/proof of what versions "work"?

We are working with Mozilla on that now.
(In reply to Anthony Hughes, Mozilla QA (irc: ashughes) from comment #30)
> Before we put up any sort of documentation we need to be sure what we are
> communicating is accurate.
The following article should be updated:
https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Using%20the%20Adobe%20Reader%20plugin%20with%20Firefox
In order to do that, post a new thread in its Discussion tab (Bugzilla is no longer used to request SUMO article updates or writings).
I see no crashes in 13.0.
Keywords: topcrash
Closing old bugs in the Plugins component. We aren't going to track issues in 3rd-party plugins in the Mozilla bug tracker. In addition, support for NPAPI plugins will be removed at the end of this year; for more details see the post at https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/

If there is a serious bug in Firefox, it needs to be filed in the "Core" product, "Plug-Ins" component.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 8 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
Product: Plugins → Plugins Graveyard
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