Thanks for your response. This form is opening within the browser and I have gotten it to work on new builds running IE8 and IE9 with Acrobat XI installed so I now do not think it is an issue between Reader and Acrobat. As far as I can tell Groupwise is MAPI compatible http://www.novell.com/documentation/developer/groupwise_sdk/gwsdk_gwma pi_readme/data/gwsdk_gwmapi_readme.html.
Also setting up Groupwise as the default program for email was one of the first things I did and it did not work on some machines. I'm having trouble finding the difference between similar builds where one seems to work and the other doesn't.