Anyway, it's not that big of a deal to me. The whole point is to make the information available to the people who need it. It just "kinda sucks" that they stripped my stamp from the front page when I was the one who sat down and spent many days upon days scanning much of that stuff into electronic files.

Assuming you're using Acrobat 4, when you save a file, click on 'security options' in the save dialogue box. Select 'standard' from the menu, and you will then have four boxes to tick: stop people printing, stop people modifying the file, stop people selecting text and graphics and stop people changing annotations and form fields. Select any or all of these as you like, then set a password to change the security options. Save the file and it's protected.

You can also do 'file' - 'sign and save' to give the file a digital signature for added protection and identification if one of your PDFs appears on another website.

Anyone who then downloads the file and opens it using the full version of Acrobat will find the relevant buttons and menu options (e.g. in your case 'documents' - 'delete pages') greyed out. If someone tries to do 'save as' with a new filename in order to get rid of the restrictions, they'll need to enter the password in order to change the security settings (i.e. allow something in the new file that you've banned in the existing one).

I imagine the procedure is pretty similar with Acrobat 5, but I've never used it and so couldn't say.

I don't know how hacker-resistant this protection is, but I guess it's better than nothing...