Another upgrade, another problem. The newest upgrade to Adobe's free reader, now called Adobe Reader instead of Adobe Acrobat Reader (good move) has an unfortunate "feature" --it has a colored box on its toolbar that cycles ads for Adobe products. Fuzzblog, an interesting tech-oriented Blogger powered blog seemed especially upset by the self-contained spam.
Fortunately, Planet PDF explains an easy fix to turn this annoying feature off. Under "Preferences" and then "Startup" there is a check box labeled "Show messages and automatically update." Sounds like that should be a good thing, right? Unclick this and the ads are gone for good.