Can anyone tell me why Adobe Acrobat Reader does not............?

I have been using adobe acrobat 7 for a long while, for downloading certain patterns from sites I belong to. At the weekend I went to download some patterns in pdf and after waiting for at least 10 mins still nothing appeared. It was not the site, as I went to various sites.It seems very strange. The only other thing diferent to my PC since I last used Acrobat is that on Friday I did try out MSN virtual earth 3D ( beta). That in itself was a nightmare as it took over my desktop. It even installed MSN as my home page, and got rid of my Internet Explorer shortcut button, and my shortcut to conect to my ISP.(Needless to say I have uninstalled that programme.)
I have sorted the desk top etc, out, but I cannot fathom out the acrobat reader business.

I would be really pleased to get this sorted without having to download the acrobat reader again.

I have always had a firewall running, and this has not affected adobe 7 in the past.

is it just adobe?
to be honest i hate the bloody thing but you cannot do without it...there ar eother reader si know, but past experience has forced me away from these (they usually end up messing something else up or the prog insists on adobe)
maybe they need you to upgrade, i have had this problem before, once i upgraded it was ok.
if all else fails then take it out and reinstall may be the only and best option, it seems virtual earth has thrown a lot of its own unwanted configurations in

It'll be your firewall interfering with the download. Try disabling your firewall when you click on an online pdf and see if that improves matters. You will probably need to tweak the firewall program control settings to allow you to download these pdfs.

Foxit PDF reader is only 2mb, (Acrobat is 20 which makes it a pain to download). It takes up less space on your hard drive, opens fast and works just as well. Try that and see which you prefer.

try Foxit reader, faster & easier