Ventura 8 and Acrobat 7

I ran across the strangest thing. I have Acrobat 7 and I also had an 
early jaws printer installed.

The other day i tried to distill a test page from Ventura 8 that 
included a small black and white photo. I left the photo external.

Acrobat distiller froze and would not distill at all. Jaws created a pdf 
but no matter what I did it placed the text and photo on a landscaped 
page rather than the portrait format I had selected.

Eventually I embedded the photo and Acrobat distilled fine although 
remarkably slowly. Jaws still would not work.

I got rid of (uninstalled) Jaws and installed several other free pdf 
printers such as PDFCreator, PDF995 and CutePDFWriter. All three worked 
fine...and almost instantaneously...although I have yet to try it any of 
them with an external (un-embedded) photo.

But my question...what is wrong with Adobe Acrobat and Ventura? Even 
with Acrobat 5, I found that other printers worked better and faster 
from Ventura. I couldn't rely on the combination to convert a whole 
chapter to pdf all in one go, much less an entire publication