Stop Edge from taking control of PDF's permanently!!!

[ADMIN EDIT: Please remember to be respectful to others in this community.] My company (which employs several former Microsoft devs) has had to spend tens of thousands of dollars to combat this issue. Microsoft AGGRESSIVELY tries to make its own apps the default for everything. And they AGGRESSIVELY develop schemes to change the ways users can access these settings, making them more difficult to find for most average users, who will either give up or pay a professional to fix it.

The above-mentioned "User Choice" was actually designed to create a conflict with any external app. By putting it in the registry, they are actually taking away user choice.

The "Edge resets the "User Choice" reg entry every time it updates... which is at least weekly. There have been numerous articles about the internal Microsoft discussions on this issue. Emails and memos have been leaked. They are caught red-handed. [ADMIN EDIT: Please remember to be respectful to others in this community.]

Thank you for the links.  I tried to uninstall Edge with Powershell but no luck there. So, I then tried the second method via the command prompt.  This worked!

So, now I don't have Edge, and so my Adobe doesn't get switched multiple times a day to Edge.  Now what happens is that multiple times a day Windows removes Adobe as the default for PDFs and i am left with files that have no associations.

Problem is still not solved.  Microsoft just won't let me use the program that I paid good money for, and is far superior to anything that Microsoft has offered.

... how can I permanently set Adobe as the default program for PDFs?

With difficulty.

This widespread problem - the default PDF handler eventually reverts to Edge - is not caused by anything within Edge. It is a Windows function over which the Edge engineers have no control. Nevertheless, I'm told that the Edge team are working with Windows to find a resolution, but there is none in sight at present.

For what it's worth, my understanding of the dilemma is that Windows is committed to User choice in respect of default applications. Adobe, on the other hand, makes tools available to admins to enable them to compel users to use their products exclusively and confound user choice. These policies are obviously incompatible.

Perhaps there needs to be a two-tier system: one for home users with the current user choice protection and another for enterprise users with managed devices, where admins can specify which third-party software can or should be used. After all, many companies already dictate which browser employees are to use, and Mozilla has devised a mechanism for bypassing the user choice limitations to ensure that Firefox remains the default permanently. There are thus several ways out of the dilemma, and it's now up to the devs to settle on an acceptable one. Meanwhile, affected users and their admins just have to be patient. When a solution is found and deployed for testing, it will be announced at the TechCommunity site.

Because there's nothing further to be added to this discussion at this stage, and because it's attracting unhelpful responses, it is now locked. Anyone wishing to add something new is encouraged to start a new one using the option on the Participate menu at the top of every page at this site.

Hi Greg

No problem, I will when it is resolved.

But not yet.  I have just edited and saved a couple of PDFs using Adobe and now Edge has taken over again!  I would really just like to delete Edge as it is not of any use to me and is only causing me grief and frustration.

Hi Lester,

I have been dealing with the exact same nonsense for the last 2 years and Microsoft has done absolutely nothing to solve. I have wasted hours on the phone and over 20 e-mails with MS support (service request number is 1495470132) with zero remedies. I had (3) freshly installed Windows 10 Home machines that both continuously change the default .pdf setting from Adobe to Edge. The last request from Microsoft was to reload the machinea which was not an option for us because we did not have (2) days to waste reloading.

Well, I went one step further and just purchased a new Window 10 Pro machine with AMD 7 2 weeks ago with a fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro and within 7 days Windows set the .pdf default back to Edge from Adobe Pro and FoxitPDF. We have also tried all of the recommendation listed in this post plus many more and none of them work. There are 100's if not 1000's of complaints online of both retail and commercial users having the same exact issues dating all the way back to 2015. This bug has existed since the beginning of Windows 10 and Microsoft has refuses to fix it.

Greg, looking forward to hearing your feedback or recommendations? Lester, have you found any fixes on your end?

Thanks,
-Todd