I have been using Nuance PDF Converter Pro for some time now. An intro version came with a scanner, and I upgraded. While it's not free, so far as I can tell this $99 program (sometimes available for $49 on special offers, which is how I bought it) does everything that about $400 worth(?) of Adobe trash does. (The Nuance program bundles in ABBYY OCR which about the same price as the Nuance program if you buy it separately.)

Unfortunately, we've encountered a number of web sites that demand that you have Adobe Reader, and if you don't they ask you to "download and run TODO." As far as I can tell, there is no program called TODO. It's a "notation" in a canned web page insert that Adobe (or someone) provides for controlling PDF downloads, and the TODO means "this is a place for you TO DO the rest of the page design."

(The TODO trash showed up for a while on the US Supreme Court page for downloading Court Decisions, but they apparently fixed the script fairly quickly.)

If you click to "allow" "TODO" IE immediately crashes completely.

I was forced to install Adobe Reader in order to not get the "TODO" popup, although even with Reader on the machine the PDF files open in my defualt Nuance PDF program. (If you have the latest Reader appropriate for your OS version you probably won't see TODO - I think. I ran into it only when I had NO Adobe Reader installed, and Lin got hit when her Reader fell behind on updates.)

We've also encountered at least two other applets that sites demand must be enabled to open or download PDF files. These apparently are NOT Adobe products, but I haven't been able to find much about who produces them. They probably are Java-based, but seem to need something other than the normal Java apps. My Norton gives them a clean report so we've used them (cautiously) when necessary, and haven't seen any problems from them. They've appeared infrequently enough that I don't recall the names, but maybe I can remember to make a note of them "next time." (If they show up again before I forget about it(?).)

John