hardwarefetish.com

Adobe Reader ] 21208 update breaks Acrobat Reader on Windows 7 – Fix

It seems that Adobe rolled out an automatic update that breaks Adobe Reader on Windows 7 with the error message “This program couldn’t launch because the object api-ms-win-core-winrt-l1-1-0.dll is missing”.

So someone didn’t verify the application before rolling out an update and breaking thousands of installations. Looks like abd QC for me. Interestingly, if you download Adobe Reader from the official page and Select Windows 7 as an OS, it still offers you the broken version to download instead of a working one and it also seems, even though the error has already been reported, Adobe still continues rolling out the broken update giving me a flood of calls by users whose Adobe Read installation suddenly gets broken. Thank you, Adobe! >:-( 

As this error is so common and the broken update still is getting rolled out, I made a little batch script in order to fix it to save work. Here are the instructions on how to get it working again:

1. Uninstall broken Adobe Reader from Control Panel
2. Download AcroRdrDC2500121111_de_DE.exe fpr German or AcroRdrDC2500121111_en_US.exe for English
   A list of available download sources can be found here.
3. After installing the older working version, disable all update-mechanisms and also remove the RdrCEF.exe and AdobeCollabsync.exe bloat that doesn’t work on Windows 7 anyways and also eats up huge amounts of memory in the background for nothing.
   I made a batch script (with help of AI to save myself time) that automates the process, download this script (right click – save as…) and execute is as an Administrator. You may want to read its contents first if you do not trust it. For this you can open it with notepad.
4. Launch Adobe Reader, should work again

Here is what the script does:

1. Disable and stop the Adobe updater service
2. Delete the Adobe Updater Task that runs peridodically
3. Set a policy to disable updtes in Adobe Reader
4. Remove the bloatware by renaming the executables so that they don’t get found and also rename updater executables so that they won’t accidentally launch.

In case you reinstall the Adobe Reader, the bloatware and updater will get reenabled again.

Hope this helps.

Update, 22.02.2026

It seems that all these steps are still not sufficient to prevent Adove from updating, *grrr*
So updater host also needs to be blocked via hosts-file. Have a look at the comments section for a host list.

Alternatively, it seems that it is enough to add a WinRT stub file for the missing .dll to c:\windows\syswow64 in order to make the latest Adobe version work again. Just download x86 32bit version from here. This hint was given in the original complaint thread and even though the affected functions in that DLL do not do anything and just reurn 0, it seems to work, possibly the WinRT that gets initialized there is not really used in Adobe Reader.
The specific file I downloaded is this one from the orange “Start download” button.

However, be aware that when solving it this way, you may need to execute my batch file after every update again to disable all the bloatware (CollabSync and RdrCEF) that comes with every update, as it just eats up your memory and slows down your machine.

Update, 01.03.2026

As people seem to be concerned about the stub DLL from the dllme.com site: I was concerned too and thus I checked the DLLs with a disassembler first before using them and posted my results here. They are really just DLLs that contain NULL-Stubs fo the exported WinRT-functions, so no malware included.
You can check them with your favourite disassembler yourself.
The correct file is named api-ms-win-core-winrt-l1-1-0.dll and has 13.192 bytes, so that you can compare.

6 comments | Add One

Leave a Comment