Recently we've been getting quite a few e-mails with people having trouble with the written study helps we provide.  The "short story" is that folks should upgrade Adobe Reader to the latest version (which, at the time this article was last updated, is version 9).  Luckily, that can be done for free at:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Depending on how old the version you presently have is you can get various errors.  Some have complained of it coming up blank, others of receiving an encryption error, etcetera.  All of these will be remedied if you upgrade using the link above.

If you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat (instead of just the Reader), you also should upgrade--but we do realize that that isn't free.  However, the recent slew of e-mails about the study notes was because they were saved in a format that was backward compatible to version 7 and above--two generations behind the current version.  We did roll it back to version 5 for now, but at some point we'll need to take advantage of more recent functionality (Adobe was the one who decided that being backward compatible to version 7 was the right choice when we upgraded to version 9).

We do upgrade Adobe Acrobat regularly.

Finally...you may have noticed that we password protect the files--but only against making changes (it allows high-quality printing and copying text from the document).  It is the encryption related to this that actually causes most of the trouble if people aren't using a recent version of Acrobat Reader...