Adobe just doesn't get it. Really. Reader 5.1 takes 8 seconds to launch on my 1GHz PowerBook G4. Reader 6.0 takes a minimum of 25 seconds to launch, and that's not even opening a file. v5.1 scrolls 2-3 times faster then v6. Everything Adobe makes runs like molasses in Mac OS X, but <i>this</i> takes the prize. Even Photoshop launches faster.
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Items in the toolbar are too faint to read easily, their home-rolled help tags look non-standard, and many of their interface widgets are non-standard. They must be using one of those write once-compile for multiple platforms development frameworks that makes life easy for them but does a lot of stuff "by hand" so the same code can run on mulitple platforms.
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For what it's worth, you can speed the launch considerably if you remove most of the plug-ins (v5 doesn't use plug-ins). I got the launch time down to 9 or 10 seconds by removing plug-ins and I was still able to view the PDF files I opened with it. But it's still going in the trash.