Today I was thankful that I remembered this thread.
One of my older pub includes many PDF files, which previously interacted with Opus with no problems. When I tested this old pub on a computer with the latest version of Adobe, I encountered problems, which rightly or wrongly, I put down to some incompatibilities I'd read about between older and latest versions of Adobe.
I decided that converting these PDFs to EXEs would be the way to go, so I downloaded a copy of PDF2EXE. It worked without problem until I tried to convert a file containing 34 pages of tables and text. This attempt produced "Out of memory" error messages. Given the amount of memory on the test machines, this was unlikely.
Despite this error message, I could print the file from Acrobat, so I did that. I'm guessing that there is an error in the file, and that error caused PDF2EXE to hang. Incidentally, although the developers could not help, their reply was fast -- within 2 hours.
The thought of re-keying this large complex document was daunting. My solution might interest others who find themselves in a similar situation.
Using Google and Download.com, I found several files which claimed to be able to convert a scanned image to a PDF document. As I expected, some applications did not support this claim. Others did, but were far too expensive for my budget. And...I found nothing that was free and worked
I eventually settled on JGS-Scan, available from
http://www.jgs-soft.com/ for US49.
This worked like a dream. I placed the printed copy on the ADF, clicked scan in JGS-Scan and within a couple of minutes had the required PDF file. PDF2EXE converted this to the EXE. IMHO, well worth the cost
It's likely that from now on I will convert PDF files to EXEs when using them with Opus.