Also, why is there always a new version of Acrobat Reader to install? Also, why does adobe launch a relatively huge app to detect and tell me this whenever I'm in the middle of doing something important. It's like it knows "Oh, the system is under a lot of load already, I should fire up now since the user is clearly at his computer"

I only have Adobe Reader installed to handle fill in form apps (IE, passport renewal). In the past, I've manually deleted the adobe autoupdater from my system to avoid the slow downs. It's worse than spyware.