I'm just posting this in case someone else has this peculiar problem. (I'm not really sure it has anything to do with the IDCS install, but that's when it started occurring for us.)

Opening a PDF in Acrobat 5 was fine, until installing IDCS. Uninstalling IDCS on most PCs solved the problem, but we still needed to have some kind of fix. (We're converting from Quark 4.11r0.)

The workaround, strangely, turned out to be to create a document in Quark, place a PDF on the document, save and close Quark. Only then were we able to open PDFs instantly (no slow redraw) in Acrobat. However, that only worked for that particular Acrobat session. If you closed Acrobat, you had to place a PDF (any PDF) on a Quark page and save the document.

Adobe suggested I delete all instances of adobefnt*.lst, but that didn't work. So I decided to try more drastic measures. I removed everything from the Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 5\Required\Font directory, then deleted all the instances of adobefnt*.lst.

Voilą! It worked, although I have no idea why. IDCS is fine; Quark is fine; Acrobat's fine.

HTH anyone else who's experiencing this!

~j~