[X4U] Default application to open pdf on double click, and icon

[stephen e. schwartz]

I prefer to open pdf documents in acrobat 4 in classic (I have the full
app; this allows me to underscore, make notes etc).

I used to have this as the default app to open files by double clicking.
This has worked fine for years.

Somehow something has gotten royally messed up. If I generate a document
and save to pdf using distiller via the print dialog, it saves it as a
colorsync utility document. Ditto for pdf attachments coming in on email.
Ditto pdf files that I save to disk using firefox.

Worse, many (but not all) of the multitude of pdfs on my hard drive have
had their icon changed to a generic pdf document icon (a couple of stacked
photos) and the default app changed to colorsync.

In principle I should select a .pdf document, do file info on it, change
the app to open it with using the pull down menu (this works, although it
changes the file date to now); get the dialog that asks if I want to do
this with all; confirm that I do. What happens is that the file that I just
told to open with acrobat 4 reverts to colorsync and no other files change.

Somehow colorsync has taken over commmand. This behavior persists even if
colorsync is off (which is hard for me to keep that way because I have a
habit of double clicking pdf files).

I removed colorsync put it in the trash. And my computer started making
illustrator CS2 the default app for pdfs.

So a bunch of questions.

1. Any idea why I get nowhere by trying to get all my acrobat 4.0 documents
to open with acrobat 4.0?

2. I would really like to do a global change of all .pdf documents to open
with acrobat 4.0 but would NOT like to change the file modified date. Any
idea how?

OS 10.4.11.

By the way in the pull down menu on the get info page I have 8 apps above
the line and 10 (including acrobat 4.0) below the line, if that matters.

And you will probably want to know what brought this around. the short
answer, I think, is that I used colorsync to read a pdf document, and
everything went downhill from there.

And one more clue: If I _do_ change the default app for a single document
to acrobat, the icon shows up as some sort of unrecognized hairy looking
blob; if I select that icon in the get info dialog page and delete it, I
get a nice clean looking acrobat icon. But this procedure does change the
file modify date.

I would welcome suggestions.

thanks

-steve