Why is adobe acrobat such a memory hog?

[zanzibar]

Whenever I open a pdf, my entire system slows down to a crawl.  And not even a turtle crawl.  It's closer to the movement of tectonic plates, or the decay of the moon's orbit.

Any ideas?  Could something be wrong?  I have a fast computer.

[bilbous]

Because they fill it full of useless functionality. If you want to look at ordinary pdf's you might try ghostscript. It is an open source pdf reader and has Windows ports