latex background image issue

Question

Using the Latex eso-pic package I am inserting a background image using the following lines:

\AddToShipoutPictureBG{
 \AtStockLowerLeft{
  \includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight]{picture}}}

\begin{document}
...

This works; every page now has my picture as the background. However, as soon as I insert a picture in any of my chapters and I open the created *.pdf document using adobe reader (after succesfull compilation using pdflatex), adobe crashes with the following message: "There was an error processing a page. There was a problem reading this document (131).". I use the following lines for inserting pictures:

\begin{figure}[h]
 \begin{centering}
  \includegraphics[width=1.0\columnwidth]{my_picture}
 \par\end{centering}
 \protect\caption{This is my picture.
 \label{fig:my_picture}}
\end{figure}

I have the feeling that this is caused by the fact that I'm trying to draw two pictures on top of each other (background + in-text picture). But I have no idea on how to solve this. Any ideas?

Below I added an example:

\documentclass[english]{report}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\usepackage[a4paper]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{eso-pic}

%Uncomment following lines to enable background picture (note that there is a 
%bug right now, for some reason having a background image and iserting images
%using \includegraphics does not work correctly. It does compile but *.pdf
%document can not be opened.)
%\AddToShipoutPictureBG{
% \AtStockLowerLeft{
%  \includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight]{background}}}

\begin{document}

% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- %

\chapter{Introduction \label{chap:Introduction}}

\section{Background}
Blabla

\begin{figure}[htb]
 \centering
  \includegraphics[width=1.0\columnwidth]{figure_1}
 \caption{This is my first picture.}\label{fig:figure_1}
\end{figure}

% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- %

\chapter{Conclusion \label{chap:Conclusion}}

\section{Conclusion}

We can draw the following conclusions:
\begin{itemize}
 \item Conclusion 1
\end{itemize}

\begin{figure}[htb]
 \centering
  \includegraphics[width=1.0\columnwidth]{figure_2}
 \caption{This is my second picture.}\label{fig:figure_2}
\end{figure}

% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- %

\end{document}

This code compiles fine and I can open the resulting PDF file. However, as soon as add the background by uncommenting the comment lines compiling is no problem but viewing using acrobat reader is a different story: "There was a problem opening this document. The file is damaged and could not be repaired."

Answer 1

Just found the solution in this post: How to overcome Acrobat Reader error 131 with a pdfLaTeX doc?

Adding the following line at the very beginning of the tex file did the trick

\pdfminorversion=4

Answer 2

use it this way:

\begin{figure}[htb]
 \centering
  \includegraphics[width=1.0\columnwidth]{my_picture}
 \caption{This is my picture.}\label{fig:my_picture}
\end{figure}

\centering is a switch and not an environment and \caption itself starts a new paragraph. And for width=1.0\columnwidth the \centering is not needed, the image is already of linewidth