AxAcroPDF swallowing keys, how to get it to stop?

Question

The AxAcroPDF swallows all key-related events as soon as it gets focus, including shortcuts, key presses, etc. I added a message filter, and it doesn\'t get any key-related

Answer 1

I might finally have a ridiculously simple answer. So far in testing this is working.

Having suffered from this problem for quite some time and having built a complex system of each custom control recording which of them last had focus and using a timer to flip focus back (when acropdf grabbed it) I revisited this problem and read a great number of answers (looking for recent solutions). The information gleaned helped me with the idea.

The idea is to disable the (acropdf) control whilst it is loading as in the following example (code reduced for clarity)

AxAcroPDF_this.Enabled = False

AxAcroPDF_this.src = m_src

Then on a timer, after say 1 second.

AxAcroPDF_this.Enabled = True

Basically the idea is to tell Windows not to let users use the acropdf control until allowed, so asking Windows to prevent it from getting focus (because users are not allowed in there).

So far this is holding up, I will edit this if anything changes. If it doesn't work completely for you then maybe the idea points into a useful direction.