Yes - I agree jeckyl - there's something really weird about
how the player is downloaded and/or
installed on the windows platform - it's impossible to
reproduce with any amount of consistency as I
myself have never had a single problem with any version of
the flash player on multiple PCs running
windows 95, 98, 2000, XP home and XP Pro - IE and Firefox
(all versions).
Yet there are way too many reports of people having a hard
time:
1. Downloading the player.
2. Installing the player
Why, on some machines - possibly less than 1% of them, the
player is being installed to a temp cache
folder is beyond me. Assuming the machines this is happening
on have default settings - there's no
possible way to troubleshoot unless the machine is
accessible. And even then there's no guarantee.
It's frustrating to hear these player issues and no concrete
solution.
Her'e one person's solution posted recently in this or some
other thread:
Richelle,
This seems to be a sticky issue, but I'll offer some of what
I have learned
about this stuff.
First, it appears that the Flash Player 9 has incorporated
some new security
features in order to comply with Windows Vista stuff. These
features (not sure
specifically what they are) make use of some registry areas,
permissions, and
other features of IE7 for the first time. As a result, your
registry and some
parts of your IE6 installation could be corrupted and you
never noticed a
serious problem until the new version of Flash Player.
Not knowing just what causes the problems, I have been able
to duplicate some
of these issues on my computer. Unfortunately, these problems
were encountered
when I was not expecting problems so I didn't document the
steps and I cannot
reproduce the errors.
However, my latest partial process to "fix" problems are as
follows:
Get the newest version of the Flash Uninstaller (as of
11/14/2006) from this
Tech Note:
http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_14157
and run it as instructed in the
tech note. Do not use any existing Uninstaller you may have
on your computer
now.
Go to the folder "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\Macromed\Flash" and
delete all the files
in this folder. (leave the folder)
Go to the folder "C:\WINDOWS\Downloaded Program Files" and
if you find
"Shockwave Flash Object", delete it. It should not appear, as
it will only
show if you have correctly registered the ActiveX control (in
which case you
would not be having these problems).
Just for grins, open the Control Panel, Add or Remove
Porgrams and look for
any instances of Flash Player that may still show. Hopefully,
there will be
none.
Now, go to www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/ and
insure that it does
not show Flash Player version installed.
To be safe, reboot your computer into "Safe mode with
Networking" to make usre
none of your security programs are interfering. This will
insure that you
don't have any programs running that might use Flash. See
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315222
if you need to know how to do this.
I have found references that Norton Internet Utilities can
interfere with the
Flash Player install (
http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_19166),
so at least de-active
it before installing the new Flash Player.
Now open IE7 and open the Adobe.com home page and click on
the link to install
Flash Player. If you get no error messages, then you are
likely in good
condition. If you get error messages, note these and let me
know what you find.
Now go to "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\Macromed\Flash" and check
that you have two
files installed (Flash9b.ocx (v9.0.28), FlashUtil9b.exe).
This indicates that
the files downloaded correctly from Adobe and are available
to IE7.
Finally, go again to the "C:\WINDOWS\Downloaded Program
Files" and look for
"Shockwave Flash Object" It should show in the Status column
as "Installed".
This shows that the ActiveX control has indeed registered. If
this is not
present, then we can go to a next layer of troubleshooting.
This approach is a bit tedious, but it should insure that
you have no
interferring stuff active, and that you have removed all
existing traces of
Flash Player installs.
Hope this helps a bit as it did for me.
-c
Jeckyl wrote:
>>I am not sure why it is so important for some people
on this forum to deny
>>that
>>there are many users experiencing this problem.
>
>
> There are indeed people with problems. The vast majority
of people don't
> have them. If only we knew what it was about the PC
setup and way they
> install for these very few people who have the problem
so we could have nice
> clear answers to give out. If it WAS happening to a LOT
of people and was
> easily reproducible, then it would be easy to come up
with answers. The
> reason that it is such a nasty problem is because it
happens to relatively
> few people. So while the vast majority have no problems
and enjoy life, for
> those few who DO have problems, its very frustrating.
>
>
>>In the meantime, the "Experts" that are saying this
is an isolated problem
>>should learn a bit of humility, IMHO. Even if it is
rare now, going into
>>denial
>>just masks the problem.
>
>
> I deny being in denial
> --
> Jeckyl
>
>
