When executing acroreader it fails with "error while loading shared libraries: libxml2.so.2: cannot open shared object file"

I resolved this issue on my 64 bits Ubuntu (13.10) using the following terminal command:

sudo apt-get install libxml2:i386 libstdc++6:i386

Maybe this is an issue with symbolic link to the correct version.

Identify the library dependency of your program and locate the library like this (I don't have acroread, but should be same):

$ which evince
/usr/bin/evince
$ ldd /usr/bin/evince | grep libxml
libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so.2 (0xb7534000)
$ ls -l /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      16 Jul 16 20:48 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so -> libxml2.so.2.7.8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      16 Jul 16 20:48 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so.2 -> libxml2.so.2.7.8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1360484 Jul 16 20:48 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so.2.7.8

If you do not have symlink named libxml2.so.2 pointing somewhere, create one:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so.2.7.8 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so.2

Change evince to acroread in your case. Hope this helps.