Yes I know that Adove Acrobat 8 is out but today I was working with a slow rendering Adobe Acrobat 7 and tried to figure out how to disable plugins in Adobe Acrobat 7 when I ran across this blog post
How to make Adobe Reader 7.0 load faster
Not only is there some hacks for the application that should speedup your Adobe Acrobat 7 but also there is a link to a great speedup utility that you can download from Acropdf which gives you a bunch of tools to get rid of some of those background problems with Adobe Acrobat
