On a Terminal Server today some users were experiencing red and black patches appearing when they opened PDF files.

A Knowledge Base article at Adobe indicates a similar, but evidently not the same, issue having been rectified in Adobe Reader 8.1 - that of the color not being rendered correctly for the first rectangle object in a section of a PDF document. Evidently not the same because it didn’t work for me. What did work however was disabling Text Smoothing.

Here is how to do it:Open Adobe Reader | Document | Accessibility Setup Assistant | Set all accessibility options | Next

TICK THE BOX to DISABLE TEXT SMOOTHING

Next | Next | Next | Done

And bingo, no more red and black patches appearing.