Out of interest...are you permitted to print the protected PDFs? If so couldn't you 'print' them to another (unprotected) PDF file using software such as (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ ) and then load this file....? I'm sure there's probably some obvious error in this method (other than the extra time involved) and if so sorry just ignore me
, just wondered if it was even feasible.