"successful" installation not successful

[dolule]

The past few days, I have been unable to view YouTubes or anything else where you click on an arrow to watch.  This occurs in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.  YouTube via Firefox will state: "An error occurred. Please try later"; YouTube via Explorer tells me to download the latest Flash Player.  On non-YouTube sites, I usually just get a black space where the arrow had been. 

When I go through the process of installing the latest version of Flash Player, everything seems to be going well and Adobe tells me that the installation was successful; however, I still have the same problem.

If I go through Adobe to try to uninstall earlier versions of Flash Player, it is supposed to either tell me the version I have or give me an error message, but all I get is a blank space.

If I go through the Control Panel "uninstall" in Windows Vista, only the Adobe Flash Player 11 Plugin that I just installed will be listed and its "size" is blank. 

If I go to Windows Explorer, I can find various "Flash Player" folders:

(1) one AppData\Roaming\Adobe folder (6/14/2012)

(2) three different AppData\Roaming\Macromedia folders (2007, 2009, 2010)

(3) one AppData\Local\Macromedia (6/16/2012 - this one is empty)

(4) Program Files, but the only contents are the subfolder "AddIns", the sub-subfolder airappinstaller, airappinstaller.exe (modified 6/26/2010; size 53 kb) and digest.s (modified 6/26/2010).

I can't find the AFP 11 Plugin that the Control Panel says I have.

Norton has Flash Player 11.3. "allow".

[pwillener · Accepted solution]

Crashing in both Firefox and Internet Explorer "could" indicate a problem with the graphics drivers.

What is your display adapter, device driver version & date?  See http://forums.adobe.com/thread/945765

If updating the device drivers does not solve your problem, I recommend that you revert to Flash Player 11.2 (see http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1022066) and turn off auto-update until a new Flash Player version is released.