The Case of the Passive Install, Acrobat 2015 (DC) Revistited

In a previous post I discussed preparing passive installers for Microsoft Office 2013 as well as Acrobat 2015 (DC).  I’ve had to make a few minor tweaks to the former, but I’ve run in to a bit of showstopper with the latter.  Although the installer for Acrobat itself works fine for normal situations, when installed as part of a base image that will have sysprep run on it the install doesn’t act properly after image deployment.

Because we are an enterprise environment we have a volume license and install of Acrobat 2015.  Consequently, we don’t have or need to sign in with any Adobe ID to use the software.  Users can if they wish, but it isn’t required.  The installer we have skips all of this and starts the program directly.  After a computer it is installed on is subjected to a sysprep and that image copied to a new computer, the Acrobat install defaults back to the original behavior of requiring an Adobe ID sign-in at launch.  If you cancel the login the program closes.

As a stopgap measure I’ve fallen back to Acrobat XI Professional.  I’m not sure how to proceed with Acrobat 2015.  For normal computers it’s just a matter of installing the program post-imaging, which isn’t that big a deal.  In my case however, I’m attempting to build base images for our virtual desktop deployment.  There is no “post-image” process I can subject my non-persistent VDI computers to, so I can’t install Acrobat 2015 after-the-fact.

I’m pretty much stuck.