Just found a really annoying bug in Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.0, the – otherwise – excellent Pocket PC PDF reader

I’ve made a lot of tests today to find out whether the final, commercial, 3.3 version of the NetFront browser causes problems with other (DLL/driver) memory-intensive applications.

While working on my thorough tests and benchmarks, I’ve run into the fact that Adobe Reader 2.0 constantly consumes between 29 and 36% CPU cycles – independent of the application loaded and even when it’s idling in the background.

I’ve tested this on all of my test Pocket PC’s (F-S Pocket Loox 720 (WM2003SE), HP iPAQ h2210 (WM2003), hx4700 (WM5), Dell Axim x51v (WM5) and HTC Wizard (WM5)), some of them freshly hard reset.

This means, in order to maintain the best battery life and best responsiveness possible, you should always shut down Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.0 (instead of just putting it in the background by just switching to another process) if you don’t plan to use it for an extended length of time. Note that if you use Exit from inside the application, it will remember the last position.