The combination (Office and Acrobat XI) should indeed work. What you could do as a first step is to Repair Acrobat (that should be in the Help menu of Acrobat).
Also, using the PDFMaker macro to create the PDFs is considered "Best Practice", because it gets most of the Word document's feature (links, cross refereces etc.) through to the PDF; something a "print to PDF" printer driver will not accomplish.
Adobe claims to have done improvements in the PDFMaker macros with Acrobat DC, which means that it might be a consideration to upgrade to Acrobat DC.
If you do not get sufficient help here, you might also ask your question in questions.acrobatusers.com, where you may encounter another group of top class experts.