Both these faults started happening around the same time (Mid November) but I treated these as seperate issues to start as they came from different companies. I could replicate both errors on my PC and I didn't have any pdf printers installed so it wasn't an issues with either of those products. I decided it might be a Microsoft Office patch and went through each one and still no fix in sight.
I did one last check with another desktop of mine that hadn't had Novembers patches installed and this had no problem at all with either of the reported faults. This gave me somewhere to look, which was in the set of patches released in November and I found the error. MS11-087 was released to fix a zero day fault in Windows that takes advantage of an exploit in the font subsystem (the worm is named Duqu so if you are a creative using TrueType fonts from any site known to Google be careful and make sure your Windows PC is running AV.) What this patch does is change the file permission for a file called t2embed.dll which lives in Windows\system32 (it also lives in the sysWOW64 folder for 64bit systems.)
and for those wanting to know how to how the Duqu worm works:
So to fix this issue you simply have to undo this permission change and give users read access to this file(s if you're on a 64bit system) and the change will kick in straight away. Either that or you can down this .msi from Microsoft that does the exact same thing, just remember to run the command prompt as an administrator and run msiexec to undo the changes, and then relax and have a beer...
