Hi

First thing to try would be to change your display settings in Acrobat itself. Do a control K and select Display from the list. THen make sure that all the smoothing items are turned on except the cool type. This will dramatically affect how vectors are displayed in pdf. I have no idea why it is turned off by default. (since I send PDF proofs all the time, I am always telling my clients to do this).

The easiest way to create the PDF is to use the acrobat distiller instance in the printer dialog box. Just select it rather than your printer. If you check the properties of that (prop button right beside the printer name), you can control quality. I think by default the conversion settings (in PDF settings tab) are set to e book. You may want to use print or another setting depending on what you want the PDF for. I made my own setting that is kind of a cross between the printer and screen settings. Down sampling should never be set higher than 300 for your photos and halftone. Black and white bitmaps at 1200 dpi is more than sufficeint as well. Prolly the biggest thing is to have all fonts embedded and have subset at 100%.

Hope this helps,
Beth