That message signaled the end of my attempt to install the upgrade to Adobe Acrobat 7.1.0 Professional. Prior to that (for about a week) I had two less serious problems with the Adobe program. Every time I selected anything on the start menu ("Control Panel", or "My Computer" are two examples), I would have to sit through one or two or even three back to back sets of "Please wait while Windows configures Adobe" followed by "Please wait while Windows installs Adobe". Windows was getting way too busy. The Adobe programs always worked great. Even this past week, in spite of Adobe letting me know several times per day that "Adobe is unable to locate a resource in (the folder in the title)" the program (Adobe) wouldn't completely bomb out for the most part, instead it would valiantly struggle with the cantankerous operating system (Windows XP Professional), and pretty much get the job done.
But horrors came soon enough. When I tried to open a word document that I had worked on just the previous week, I got the totally rude "(Path name) is not accessible. Access is Denied" I tried to deal with being suddenly locked out of that folder by using the 'turn off simple file sharing/take ownership of the folder' fix for Documents folders that get seized by the system during a conversion to XP. But that didn't work. This computer came brand new equipped with XP 3 years ago. the only thing I did recently that could possibly have precipitated this disaster was installing Netgear to facilitate a change in internet access. I have uninstalled Netgear now but the chaos remains. I also disabled Windows firewall but that didn't help either.
I hope someone knows how to recover that folder, called "Documents", because a lot of what I get paid for is (hopefully) there. Fortunately, most of my work is in the "My Documents" folder that wasn't caught up in the glitch, and has now been backed up.
One more detail. The folder "Documents" used to be called "Shared Documents", and had 20 or so documents and a few subfolders (like "Jeff's Documents") but now claims to contain zero bytes. Can this be correct? Where is all my hours, days, and weeks of work that I thought was safely tucked away in that folder?