I am having the same problem with Adobe Acrobat Pro XI 11.0.7 on a Windows 8.1 64 bit computer. From within any application (Word, Excel, PPT, Browser, etc.) navigate to Print... and select AdobePDF as the printer. The background print process hangs until the application is halted. Then the Access Denied box pops up and then the distiller progress box. This only started recently (within the last 3 months) for me. I update my apps/op system relatively regularly. There are several annoying workarounds - save to PDF, or perhaps my favorite, use a different PDF product.
Running an application like Word as "administrator" (e.g. right click the word icon in the Office directory and click "Run as Administrator") improves the situation but doesn't always fix it (which is puzzling, since my user id is already an "administrator"). I've also marked all files under my UserID windows folder (Users>myuserid) as "Full Control" as suggested by several windows security policy posts, but to no avail. Thanks to everyone's experience so far, I've concluded deleting/adding the printer or uninstalling/installing Adobe is a waste of time. Since this started recently, it has to be either a Windows or Adobe update, no doubt a technical response to a security hole discovered by a hacker. It might also be possible that this has been caused by the UserID change that Windows recently introduced (e.g. "use your MS Live ID instead of the simple thing you used to use"). That makes some sense to me, as security policy might not be exactly the same for the old ID and the converted Live ID. Short of dropping back to the root C:\ and changing security to "full control" for the entire machine, I'm quite frustrated.
Certainly, someone from Adobe MUST know what is causing the problems...
I'll watch this space for a miracle to occur. In the meantime - Save to PDF. Ugh.