I looked here and nothing seemed to apply. Click on Yes, and the whole repairing process will proceed further. A new dialogue box will appear asking permission to establish the connection. From there, click on Help, and click on the Repair Installation button from the drop-down list. But the advice is to turn Protected Mode back on once troubleshooting is complete. Run Adobe Reader on your Windows 11 PC, and head over to the Menu bar. So I tried steps 1, 2, and 3 of the suggestions here, and what helped, like a charm, was to uncheck 'Protected Mode' (in the Security(Enhanced) preference page). Lately it got much worse, so that even starting Reader by itself without an open file would lead to it being non-responsive, mostly, forever. I tried re-installing, repair installation, duck-duck-go'ing for answers, but nothing helped. When I would open any pdf doc (with rare, occasional exceptions) Acrobat Reader would be unresponsive for a minute or so, and then work perfectly.

I have had a similar problem for a long time.

Adobe acrobat reader not working