Since a recent upgrade the startup script for acroread in /usr/X11R6/bin/acroread on a SUSE 10.2 system generates 
error messages due to a wrong pattern matching used in this script. 
Depending on the environment of the user this simply generates an eror message on the shell like:

/usr/X11R6/bin/acroread: line 493: [: -ge: unary operator expected

Sometimes it also leads to a loop in the shell so that acroread is not started at all.

The problem is line 425 in /usr/X11R6/bin/acroread where the version of libgtk-x11
is determined by using sed with a pattern that matches a version number like
2.0.so.0.100.*

but the current version on a 10.2 system is:
 
/opt/gnome/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.1000.6

Please note that this version contains the pattern so.0.1000. but the pattern in line 425 matches only  so.0.100.

So the version cannot be determined which leads to the problems described.