<rant>
If you're anything like me, you can't stand Adobe Reader. Who wants to wait 30 seconds - 1 minute to read a 1 page document? And then when you close the file, does the process terminate? Of course not, why would it do that? Wouldn't it be much better to let it sit in memory, forcing you to manually kill it instead
</rant>
My solution:
For about the past 6 months or so I've been using FoxIt Reader as my primary PDF reader. FoxIt is much, much more lightweight than Adobe Reader. With an 8 page document, it has a 3.5 MB footprint. Compared to Adobe's 28 MB footprint on the same file, this is fairly impressive (statistics courtesy of Task Manager).
FoxIt Reader boasts an impressively small 3.4MB footprint For my basic PDF reader use, FoxIt has been excellent. It's free, quick, contains all the features I've wanted to use, and I've never had a PDF file break since using it. Other advantages of FoxIt Reader include its flexible add-on architecture, standalone version for use on USB drives, O/S portability (including support for Linux, Windows Mobile, and U3 devices), a PDF editor plugin for sale, and an SDK for use in your application*.
The only problem I've run into so far is slight difficulty integrating FoxIt into Internet Explorer, meaning the PDF document opens in the standalone reader instead. Sometimes I actually prefer that behavior over the IE integration.
Did I mention it's free? :)
You can download FoxIt Reader 2.0 [for Windows] (released 9/12/2006) here as a standalone executable or a full Windows Installer.
That's all for now,
Joe
*If you use Adobe Acrobat for more advanced features (such as editing & creating/distilling), you may want to check the FoxIt Reader 2.0 Version Features Comparison chart.