I have Windows 98 and Adobe Acrobat Reader (and RealPlayer). When downloading a file requiring processing by Adobe my system always brings up the Real Player screen which is not required. Adobe never gets a chance to process the required incoming file. The Adobe file is resident on my C drive as rp505enu.exe. When downloading Acrobat I was asked whether I wanted to send the file to System or All files. I left it at System. Can you assist please as I really need to access certain Adobe doctored information?

From the description of the problem it seems that you have downloaded the Adobe Acrobat Reader program file but have not yet installed the program. When you download a file off the internet, as in your case rp505enu.exe, this is a box (to use an analogy) which contains all of the program files in a compressed format. You will need to run this program, by double-clicking it, in order to open the box and install the program contained within. So to fix your problem, find the rp505enu.exe file on your C drive and double-click the EXE file to run the setup program which will install Acrobat Reader. An alternative interpretation of the problem is that you have installed Acrobat Reader and simply wish to view PDF documents from the internet. In that case, the problem could be related to file associations as when you are downloading the file, Internet Explorer will look for the correct application in which to open the file (which is Acrobat Reader in your case). However, if somehow the PDF files are associated with RealPlayer, this could cause RealPlayer to open instead. This can be fixed by going to the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ control panel (in, as you guess, the Control Panel), uninstall Acrobat Reader and then reinstall Acrobat Reader by double-clicking on the rp505enu.exe file you have on your C drive. Alternatively, if this doesn’t work, when you find a PDF file you wish to view, then right-click on that file and select ‘Save Target As…’. A box will then appear prompting you to save the PDF file to a location on your hard drive. After you click ‘Save’, the file will be downloaded to your local computer so that you may view the file whenever you like (even if you are offline) as the file is now on your hard drive. After you have downloaded the file, open Acrobat Reader and go to the ‘File’ > ‘Open’ menu. From here, locate the PDF file you wish to open and click the ‘Open’ button. Personally, when I am downloading PDF files from the internet, mostly lecture notes for University, I prefer to download the whole file to my hard drive rather than view it online. The main reason is that I find it faster when the whole PDF file is downloaded as I don’t have to wait for each page to individually load when scrolling down the file.