Speed up Acrobat Reader

If you are fed up opening PDF files found in search results because of Acrobat Reader's painfully sluggish startup time, take a break. Try these to improve the startup time.

Adobe Reader SpeedUp

Adobe Reader Speed-Up significantly decreases the amount of time required for Adobe Reader to start by disabling most of the least used plug-in. This has been created as an effort to automate
the process of speeding up Adobe Reader's launch time by disabling the majority of plug-in that are completely useless for most users. It supports most of the version of Acrobat Reader.

Installing this program is very easy.

Download the zip file and extract the files to a folder. Double click on the file "Reader SpeedUp.exe" and start using the program.

Manually disable the plug-in on startup

You can disable the plug-in from loading at the startup. Simply navigate to Reader\plug_ins folder in your installation directory (default:- Program Files\Adobe\Reader x.0) and copy all the files and folders except EWH32.api and anything that says print/search to the folder Reader\Optional.

Some other tips that may improve the performance

One feature of Acrobat Reader is that when you open a PDF link in your browser, Acroread.exe stays in memory. You can use the Windows task manager to kill the process or start and exit the full application to pull it from memory. The other option is to tell Acrobat to launch the full application rather than the browser plug-in. To do this, start Acrobat Reader, go to Edit->Preferences->Internet and uncheck the box labeled "Display PDF in browser". This solves the in memory problem and I think makes for a generally better user experience.

If you are not satisfied even after trying out all these options then its time to try out the free alternatives like Foxit.