At a tangent, making many of the plugins for Reader optional rather than autoloaded makes a big difference. There's a handy little run-once program that will do this for you; I'll let the excellent NTK newsletter http://www.ntk.net explain:

'More cheap hacks to counter-impress smug MacOS X owners.
Yes, Panther's "Preview" app is a super-fast PDF viewer that's
a lot snappier than Adobe "OMFG! A vector! How do I draw
that??!!" Acrobat. Close the gap of shame (and stop yourself
eating your own fist off waiting for Acrobat to start up) by
running ADOBE READER SPEED-UP, a eensy-weensy Windows
program that deletes a bunch of Adobe plugins that you don't
care about. Voila: spend your spare time reading your doc
rather than watching Adobe go "Loading dumb-... marketing
rubbish/lousy DRM feature" for a thousand hours.
http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.php'