Constant crashes, even after startup

[urbancowgurl777]

Ergh. So, I have an issue where Flash Player is constantly crashing, daily, all the time. Updating my graphics driver seemed to help, but it's starting to get annoying again. For a while I thought it was Google Talk, because nearly everytime I was using it Flash Player would crash, so I uninstalled Google Talk. Didn't help at all, it just found other ways to crash when using VLC or searching YouTube.

It's at the point where, after I uninstall, restart, and reinstall, the page it takes you to to say "Congratulations, you have now installed Adobe Flash Player! Here is a clip that runs in Flash Player:" crashes. Seriously, right after I install it. To fix the issue I usually restart my computer, sometimes that helps. Other times it doesn't - Flash Player crashes occassionally right when I start my computer. Before I've even done anything else, it'll crash.

What I've tried:

*Updating graphics driver

*Updating various other drivers

*Restarting computer

*Clean installations/uninstallations of Flash Player

*Older Flash Player versions

What works to fix the issue:

*Sometimes restarting my computer, but only about 60% of the time I'd guess.

*Nothing

The stuff I have installed/use:

Adobe Flash Player 11 ActiveX 64-bit

Adobe Flash Player 11 Plugin 64-bit

Aurora 13.0a2 - I used normal Firefox before and tried Aurora after the crashes started happening, also tried IE (crashes in all three browsers)

Other stuff copied/pasted from DxDiagnostics that might be helpful:

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.110622-1506)

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU

T6600  @ 2.20GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570

IDT High Definition Audio CODEC

Any help at all would be appreciated, but please do keep in mind that I've tried older versions/uninstalled and reinstalled multiple times. (:

[chris.campbell]

Could you try creating a new Firefox profile to see if that makes any difference? 

Make a new profile

If not, the next thing to do would be to collect some additional information and open a bug report.  Here's a FAQ that gives the details:

How do I report a Flash Player crash to Adobe?

edit: just saw your note about IE also crashing.  I think the best thing to do at this point would be to gather the crash log information described in the FAQ and open a new bug report.

[urbancowgurl777]

I did have a bug report with crash log information from a while back (ID #3126600) which was closed when I was still having an issue.. Should I send another one?

[chris.campbell]

I think you might want to.  Your previous bug appears to have been closed after you noted that the driver update appeared to fix the crashes.  If you can generate a crash dump (see the FAQ above) that might help us understand if others have seen this and / or we have a fix available.  In addition, would you be willing to try the latest beta 11.3 build of Flash Player to see if that's also effected?

[urbancowgurl777]

I tried 11.3, without restarting my computer since I knew I was currently 'in the rut'. Crashed. (: Although about half a second of a YouTube video loaded so that I could see the first frame - that's new.

I've created a new bug report (ID #3164961). Thanks for your help by the way. (:

[chris.campbell]

Just a guess here, but I came across this blog post when I was searching for your computer model and flash player on Google.

http://anthony-holdener.suite101.com/fixing-flash-crashes-after-windows-7-upgrade-a202255

I noticed in your dxdiag report that you have this audio device, and your drivers are dated 6/28/2009.  From Dell's site, that is the latest version they supply for your laptop.  Not sure if you can find a more recent version from the hardware manufacturer (if it is indeed related to the crash).

[urbancowgurl777]

Hmm. That also reminds me - often when I went to the Device manager to poke around, the window would lock up whenever I got to the Sound pages.

The IDT website doesn't have anything about my driver at all... Maybe I'm just blind, but googling has shown me that other people do indeed have this problem. X_X They suggest to disable it.

In the Sound manager, I have the following..

AMD HDMI Output

IDT HD Audio CODEC (which is labled as my default device for speakers/headphones)

IDT HD Audio Codec (Independent RTC Headphones)

I've no idea what disabling IDT would do since it's all I have for the speakers, would even work afterwords..? But perhaps that will fix the issue?

[chris.campbell]

Do you think it would be reversible if you tried disabling to test it out?  I'd be interested to hear how it turns out.

[urbancowgurl777]

It's a disable/enable thing so it was reversible. Tried it out, there was no sound at all when I disabled. Enabled, worked again.

[chris.campbell]

When the sound was disabled, did Flash Player crash?

[urbancowgurl777]

No.

The beta Flash Player you asked me to try is quite interesting. It crashes more frequently but simply refreshing the webpage fixes it.

[availablecreenname]

Typical Adobe response....blame everything and everyone else. Listen guys, I'm on my third browser since April and I have done many clean removals and installs. I'm running high end systems and all my drivers are up to date. I have NO malware issues or problems really with anything else. It's always a Flash issue. The crashes are getting extremely annoying. It's getting to the point where certain sites like YT are almost unusable (with Flash installed. Otherwise without Flash, it's great).

One thing that is interesting is that when I have Flash completely removed from my system, none of the browsers crash at all so that to me suggests that it's not a browser issue. There's clearly a problem with Flash and I'm far from the only one out there. Just fix the darn thing...or don't and the rest of the world will move on with other plugins.

[chris.campbell]

I'm sorry, where did I blame anyone else?  As a user running high end systems, you must be aware of the complexity that different devices, drivers, and other components can have when trying to troubleshoot.  Determining these details is crucial, especially when it appears to be effecting a limited number of computers.  In this case, we weren't able to reproduce the crashes that urbancowgurl777 reported internally but we wanted more info.  This is why I requested crash logs, etc.

Flash player in particular uses hardware drivers in ways that other applications do not.  This sometimes exposes bugs in drivers that the hardware manufacturers fix.

I wish we could "just fix the darn thing", but unfortunately software development is never that straight forward.  There are bugs in every piece of software that you have installed on your computer.  Some more severe than others.  We continue to work to improve our quality and If you'd like to create a new post that details your problems, we'd be glad to take a look.  If you feel like you've got a reproducible bug, please feel free to create a new bug report at bugbase.adobe.com.

[availablecreenname]

Chris, I didn't say YOU yourself blamed anyone, I made a general remark based on most of my dealings with Adobe, whether it is a Flash plug-in issue, or an Acrobat issue or whichever. it's always the 'check with Microsoft' or 'is your PC setup correctly?' C'mon, you know that is what I was getting at because you're not that dumb. So cut the mind games. I even have had your senior people do a remote session on one of my client's machines and they couldn't find anything wrong with the setup and everything they were going to suggest, I already did for the client.  Also, when you say, "As a user running high end systems, you must be aware of the complexity that different devices, drivers, and other components can have when trying to troubleshoot." don' t try to undermine or insult my intelligence because that was definitely an underhanded shot.

Anyways, since April, I have read pretty much every thread there is on this issue on several forums and have tried ALL the 'supposedly successful' fixes. None of them work...at least not for very long. But there is one fix that I have found that has so far worked beautifully. Completely strip Flash from any of my machines and it's really not crippling my ability to use the net. Things load smoothly now and everything works beautifully without a single crash. The very few instances when Flash is required are situations that aren't business critical anyways and so, life goes on. The world is moving away from Flash so wasting anymore time on this is futile.

Good-bye.