Anyone who reads a lot of pdf files probably hates the startup slowness of Adobe Reader as much as I do.

A short stint on Google revealed this trick to speed up Reader's start time.

If you move all of the files and folders from the Adobe Reader 6.0 plugins folder (usually C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader\plug_ins) and put them in the optional folder, it will cease to load them on startup. Plugins will only load as needed. Disabling the splash screen in Edit->Preferences->Startup will speed up Adobe Reader even more. Pdf files load in half a second for me now.