VISTA series - Digital IDs, Adobe Acrobat, BER error ...

Hi again,
I'm continuing to post VISTA problems and resolutions.

Actually I'm not sure whether the problem I am going to describe is specific to VISTA only, but it appeared to me after migrating to VISTA.

So, who does not have a Digital ID (Digital signature) nowadays. I am using one since last year. I'm used to use the electronic services provided by the government, as well as digitally signing different kind of documents. I had no problems for more than an year. Until I got VISTA.

Suddenly the Adobe Acrobat (7.0.0) under VISTA did not see my digital ID. It sees some other self-signed IDs, but not the one that I really need. The strange thing is that it does see it in the "Advanced -> Security -> My digital IDs", but when I want to see details, the Acrobat errors with something like:

Certificate parsing error:
x.509 parsing error
Error encounted while BER decoding

WTF ?

After some googling, I found that it is a common, well-known by Adobe problem, with no patch/update yet (the problem seems to exists in Adobe Acrobat 8.0, too).

The problem seemed to be that there is some "peer-to-peer" certificate in the Windows Certificate Store. It is issued by [my windows login] to [my windows login], and I don't know why and when.

The solution:

• Open the Windows Certificate Manager (Start->run / search->certmgr.msc)
• Locate any "peer-to-peer certificate" you may have (the "peer-to-peer" you will see in the column "Intended purposes").
• Remove it (all of "peer-to-peer")
• Restart Adobe Acrobat

Now I think you will be able to use your digital ID with Adobe Acrobat again.

Hope this helps,
Anton