PDF preview no longer works in Explorer or Outlook
The Adobe PDF preview handler crashes silently and falls back to generic icons. Sometimes an Office update breaks the registration.
support/performance/pdf-preview-handler-crashsteps: 4
Try this first
- Open Adobe Acrobat, Edit, Preferences, General, enable PDF Preview
- Repair the Acrobat install via Help, Repair Installation
- Or switch to Microsoft Edge as the default PDF handler
- Remove legacy PDF software that still claims the handler
When to bring us in
For Outlook-only crashes: create a new Outlook profile and test there.
See also
- My laptop is suddenly slowThree main suspects: a runaway background process, near-full disk, or a Windows update in progress.
- One specific application is slow for everyoneIf an app is slow for one person: local. For everyone at once: server side or vendor side.
- Opening files from the file server takes minutesOften the server itself is fine and the issue is network routing or stalling DNS resolution.
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