Well, after letting it ride a couple days, I followed the instructions in the link I posted... worked great! I didn't have to enable "per user associations" or in any way modify the farm itself. Basically, install Adobe Acrobat 5 (for us we use 5, not 6 as 6 had some big problems in testing), install Acrobat Reader 6.02, use the ASSOC command to force all servers to use Reader as the default, then in the login script (using KIX32) trigger the registry modification based on group membership. The only change I had to make to this instruction was that I had to add a registry change to put "content/type" as ".pdf" in the same subkey as the one mentioned. Once I did that, webpages opened PDF's using Acrobat correctly.
Thanks for the help as always!!
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KiXing to the limits!
