How to download older versions of Adobe Reader?

One of my older PCs has started playing up, due in no small part to Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader messing up, closely followed by Microsoft .NET problems and missing files – the usual thing of a small problem escalating out of control and before you know it, half of your PC’s software is toast and you end up rebuilding it.

I wanted to download Adobe Reader X but Adobe’s web site forces me to use Version 11, which proved incompatible with some legacy software I use (can’t remember which).

To access older versions of Adobe Reader, simply bounce over to Adobe’s FTP site where you’ll find reader from version 6.x to the present one, Reader for Palm OS (eg for a Palm Tungsten, which I also have!), Pocket PC and Reader for Symbian. You can fetch the 'base' version (eg. 10.0.0) .msi installer file, then fetch the patch (an .msp patching file) for the last release. I have yet to successfully patch the base version up to the latest one, though, but I am running V10.0.0 successfully.

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader

Versions for Unix and more are also there if you go up to a higher directory.