A further notification eventually came from Acrobat Reader that it was unable to open the pdf file due to a conflict with “the App” (meaning Sudoku Professor?). Apparently it had just auto-updated to a new version that protects against files infected with malware by–as its default behavior–opening any new file in “protected mode”. When it could not do that, it terminated the download–or at least seemed to as I got a download error message. Possibly there were timing issues in the updating of Adobe Reader, or it already had too many files open… or something, as later attempts finally succeeded.
So whatever the actual problem was, it was apparently only a short lived difficulty.
Reading the documentation on the Adobe feature “protected mode,” I learned that when it is functioning normally, when it has a conflict with opening a file in protected mode, it asks the user if they want to open the file in unprotected mode–which for a trusted source like Sudoku Professor should be perfectly safe.