We have success!!! I thought about this for a little and decided to approach it differently . It paid off. Here's the steps I followed. For those of you who are struggling, this could be an answer. Your mileage may vary.
First, I made an assumption that it was the user's profile that was messed up because I could install Flash under another user account - same machine. Next I set a restore point and exported the user's Outlook data just in case of a catastrophe.
In normal Win, (this is important) I disabled all start up items using Mike Lin's StartUp Control Panel app. All toolbars, add-ins, add-outs, all TSRs, all background helpers - everything - so I could get a "clean" profile to work with. I also ensured that Flash 10 was showing uninstalled (not present) in Add/Remove. Placed both the downloaded uninstall executable and the downloaded install executable in the root of C:\ so I could find it easily enough.
Key step - OK, reboot and get into Safe Mode. Pull up a "command prompt" - pseudo DOS if you will. Navigated to the root. Executed this command: uninstall_flash_player.exe /clean. Ran through. Next, executed from the root still: install_flash_player.exe. Ran through.
At this point I rebooted allowing XP to come up normally but again without any startup progs loading (see step 1), including Symantec Endpoint, the chosen Anti-Malware suite. Once it was all settled in, I saw that Endpoint was still active as it's apparently called from more places than I could tell. I went into EndPoint and systematically disabled all file system protection, net protection, firewall protection - anthing that was turned on and could interfere, I turned off. I ignored EndPoint screaming at me that it was disabled - I know, I know - leave me alone for 5 minutes!! OK, launched IE6, went to the website requiring Flash, and whadda-ya-know, we had lift off!!! It no longer begs for the latest version of Flash and plays Flash perfectly. Whew! But we're not done yet.
Then I went through and meticulously started turning on the startup entries I'd disabled in step one. Added in each one by one (yes it's brutal) and rebooting each time then testing. I wanted to ensure that each startup was going to play nice with Flash. Stayed solid all the way through.
So, Pat thanks for your offer of assistance. I hope people will see this post and give it try. You can always revert by turning everything back on using MSCONFIG or Mike Lin's neat little utility which I love.
Conclusion: I don't have any idea why this happened. I suspect that perhaps EndPoint or One Care while duelling with each other had quarantined a folder or file containing some settings that IE needed to recognize/synchronize Flash with some piece of software in normal mode. Just a guess on my part. I really feel like I accomplished something today and saved the customer a rather large expense of having to re-image and re-mount and re-install everything. I'm all smiles 🙂
H
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