Rob,
You are correct, there is a binary Acrobat reader for Win9x, acrobat 5.x to be precise. The problem is sometimes when you change the default printer in Windows, acrobat doesn’t pick it up and still points to the old printer. I am forever having to instruct the clients to invoke Acrobat and print a test file manually to show/approve that the problem is with acrobat and not the application. In most cases, I get them to specifically change the printer from acrobat, then invoke the application. This is obviously time consuming and by removing acrobat out of the equation, I will have one less thing to worry about etc.
I am now changing the code to generate a postscript file to see if it works. If it does, then we are in business.
The moral of the story my friends is, stay away from PDF flles if the requirement is to print them from Java, unless of course you buy commercial PDF printing APIs from 3rd part suppliers.
Cheers,
Chris