Flash Player 11 temporarily hangs IE and Chrome

[shanehudg]

I work for an IT consulting company and I've got an unusual situation that I'm trying to help a client with.  My client has had slow internet problems for several weeks.  She is the only one on the network having the issue.  I traced the issue back to Flash Player.  The sites that cause problems are the ones with flash.  even the Adobe flash confirmation page causes problems.  And the issue is not limited to Internet Explorer.  I downloaded and installed Chrome thinking she could use it as a workaround and it had the same issue as well.  Here's her specs:

Windows 7 64-bit

Internet Explorer 9

Flash Player 11

Here's what's happening:  When opening a page with a flash component, the component takes a while (several minutes) to load and both IE (or Chrome) and Windows become nonresponsive until it loads.  I've watched the CPU usage during the time and the CPU spikes when the Flash starts to load and stays maxed out until the Flash component has loaded. 

What I've tried:

I've uninstalled and reinstalled Flash Player (including a full manual uninstall as suggested by the support documentation).  I've tried downgrading IE to version 8, completely uninstalled, downloaded a fresh copy and reinstalled IE.  Downloaded and tried Google Chrome browser.  Updated video drivers.  Ran virus scan, and checked the windows system files.

Possibly related:  I don't know if it's related but I couldn't access the Settings page when right clicking on a flash component.  I can access the global settings but the settings option is grayed out.  I noticed this when trying to disable the hardware acceleration. 

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Shanehudg

[chris.campbell]

Hi Shanehudg,

I wouldn't worry to much about the settings menu item, try right clicking on a larger swf to see if it becomes enabled (this menu item is disabled for smaller dimension swf's due to security restrictions.)

As for the temporary hangs when initializing the player, I'm not sure what's going on here.  If you view the systems event logs do you see anything out of the ordinary?  Is there any chance you could try creating a new, temporary, user account on this system to see if it's user specific?

Thanks,

Chris

[shanehudg]

Chris,

So far, I have not found anything unusual in the event logs. Also, I forgot to list it in the original post but I have already tried using different user accounts. Thanks for the suggestions. I fought this issue for 4 hours yesterday and tried everything that I could think of short of reloading windows.

Thanks,

Shane

[chris.campbell]

Does it matter what kind of Flash content is on the page?  After it loads (and hangs), are subsequent pages also affected?  Did it matter when you were able to disable hardware acceleration?  Finally, when you did the manual uninstall, did you go into the Flash folders listed in this FAQ and delete the contents (or the folders themselves)?

How do I do a clean install of Flash Player?

[shanehudg]

It seemed any flash content but I didn’t do a whole lot of browsing (mostly because it wouldn’t let me). While it’s loading, the browser and even Windows are both nonresponsive until it finishes loading. Once it loads, it navigates fine until you browse to another site with a flash component and then it hangs again until it loads.

I was never able to disable hardware acceleration because I could not access the settings menu. During the manual uninstall, I deleted the entire folders, not just the contents.

Thanks,

Shane

[Guest]

We are currently fighting this issue as well, in a corporate Windows domain environment. It only seems to affect Windows 7 + Internet Explorer 8, and it started with Flash 11.2.202.228. The same issue shows up in .233 and .235. These versions of Active X flash + IE 8 + XP work fine. As a workaround we are installing Firefox and the plugin version of Flash on the Windows 7 computers and that works fine.

The symptoms are that it takes forever for pages to load that have Flash content (e.g. www.msn.com, www.adobe.com/software/flash/about) while sites like www.google.com will load immediately. The issue only shows up when logged on as a domain user. If I log on to the same computer as a domain administrator, it works perfectly, so it looks like some sort of permissions or privilege issue to me. Nothing has changed on our domain settings in that regard.

One thing that may be different about our environment is that we have a Software Restriction Policy (SRP) Group Policy Object (GPO) in Active Directory. This policy prevents programs from running in temporary directories, including the one used by Internet Explorer. Even though Firefox + Flash works, I tried adding a path exclusion to the \windows\system32\macromed\flash\ folder to bypass the SRP but this had no effect.

So, my question to Adobe would be, what is different about the way that .228 and higher versions operate, compared to previous versions?

Jerry

[Guest]

Ok, Google is my friend once again. Looks like this is caused by a previously fixed bug in Flash that resurfaced (let's hear it for the virtues of regression testing). See the link below that describes the issue and the work around.

Jerry

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=321105

[Guest]

I had this same problem ... bug in Flash since 11.1.102.63

see here:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/999004

[Guest]

@pcunite - Interesting. We didn't start seeing complaints until .228 and only from Win7 Pro/32 bit users. Doesn't mean that others weren't seeing it, but we only have a handful of 64 bit Win7. Our testing confirms that XP Pro/32 bit is not affected even though all non-IT users are under the SRP.

@Adobe: I don't know if Adobe is still monitoring this thread, but you need to fix this. You expect this product to be used in a corporate environment even though you force us to push out an upgrade at least once a month to fix security issues that would have been avoided by designing security into the product instead of treating it as an afterthought. To add insult to injury we have to sign a license agreement to distribute your free software internally. How about fulfilling your side of the bargain and testing this thing in a Windows domain environment and getting away from release of the week? We only use Flash because we are forced to, not because we like it.

[chris.campbell]

As noted on pcunite's thread, I want to investigate this further.  I've already alerted our installer team but please open a bug at bugbase.adobe.com with a link to this thread so we can figure out what broke.

Thanks,

Chris

[Guest]

Bug reported:

https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3193896

[Guest]

I would have liked to enter a bug, but by the time I got done typing everything in and attaching a screen shot of my SRP it had timed out and threw all of my entries away. Oh well, I don't have time to sit here and keep typing it in. Tell them to look at this thread. If they need any more info, they can PM me.

[pwillener]

What you can do to increase the priority of this bug is to go to pcunite's bug report and vote.

[chris.campbell]

Definitely.  I highly recommend taking a minute and voting.

[iSilchin]

Adobe Flash hangs up (freezes) the Google Chrome and Skype in Windows 7? Here's the solution found - http://silkcode.blogspot.com/2012/07/adobe-flash-hangs-up-freezes-google.html