[processing please hold]

otherwise I seem to approach near-crash status.

I know the feeling. I won't touch a PDF file now.

[Western Phil]

You may want to see if you can download the PDF file to your computer and then open it with Adobe.

I am not an expert, but it looks to me that Firefox and Internet explorer are set up to sort of integrate the Adobe reader into the browser. This seems to me to be just asking for trouble. Opera seems to open Adobe in a separate window - none of the browser gibberish with it. I do have the Acrobat ($) version which allows some editing of some PDF documents.