Mr. Isaacs,
thank you for the quick reply. Print spooler errors were the first things that came to my mind, so the first couple of times when this issue came up, I would usually clean up all MS Office and Acrobat instances in Task Manager and then stop and restart the Printing Spooler Service. While the print spooling service shuts restarts and resumes successfully printing functionality (from Acrobat and Office that is; all other applications seem to work fine - Note and Wordpad, print from Browser, print a test page from within control panel) does not restore until after a pc reboot.
Again, we do a lot of document editing and I do not think there is a single moment where we don't have both MS Office (outlook and Word at minimum) and Acrobat open at the same time. The sequence of events as described by the user is always the same though - it starts when trying to print out a pdf document our of Acrobat and it then cripples into Office as both Acrobat and Word (but not outlook) become unresponsive. We do use print to pdf on a regular basis as well, but I can not confirm any specific correlation the applications and their behavior.