When I have any version of Adobe Acrobat installed along with MS Word, I ALWAYS convert my Word files to .pdf by printing to ADOBE PDF (the Adobe driver). Rarely, if ever, do I have a problem. Have you tried this method yet?

Yes I tried that but it didn't work either.

I've got the MS PDF extension for exporting to PDF; Acrobat caused it to not work properly too. When I tried to export with Word only I got the same result as with Acrobat. I think something's conflicting somewhere. I restored a backup image I made before installing Acrobat and everything's back to normal.