...damnit, #AcrobatReader is _such_ a piece of crap nowadays.
It's been declining for years, constantly triggering "out of memory" errors when I opened up multiple PDFs at the same time. But I've reached my limit when it crashed multiple times when I tried to search a very simple three-page PDF - while displaying an " #AI Assistant" bar that I didn't ask for and cannot seem to switch off.
I've now installed SumatraPDF . #Adobe is not worth the aggravation.