Having Flash Player Update Issues

[dbucktrsd]

I am having several issues with Flash Player Update Installations.

I administer a large number of Windows 7 and XP PCs for a school district.

It seems that Flash Player stops working altogether unless I push out the latest version to all PCs.

I use Group Policy to push the .msi Update file to the PCs, but this causes issues with a large group of PCs that refuse to Update using this method.

So, my questions are:

Why does Flash Player stop working just shortly after a new update is available? I have to go theough the Update process almost bi-weekly, which is very time consuming.

Is there an easy way to troubleshoot those PCs that have issues with the .msi Update method?

Thanks

[robchi72]

I am having a similar issue. We just received notice that 11.8.800.175 was released and so I pushed it out via group policy (.msi) as we alway have. Now users are complaining that youtube and Pandora aren't working. They are being prompted to upgrade to the newest version. Due to other sites that we work with, we use IE8. When I use Chrome, everything works fine. The problem is company wide we only support IE8. WE also have XP and windows 7 users.

[robchi72]

I should add that while troubleshooting, I've cleared the internet cache in IE8, rebooted the computer and checked add-ons, in addition to trying to tweek several security settings. no luck as of yet!

[pwillener]

There should be no need to push out minor Flash Player updates; these should install via automated background update, which does not require administrator privileges, nor any user intervention.

How exactly does Flash Player "stop working" after an update is published?  I have never experienced that.

[dbucktrsd]

Hi Pat,

I wish it were that easy.

In our school district, we restrict all users from installing anything, including updates to Flash, Acrobat Reader, etc.

This is to prevent the spread of infectious files, and it is very effective.

Now, Adobe is kind enough to provide a .msi file so that updates to their products can be pushed out via Group Policy, and for the most part, it works. I have been using this process for almost 2 years now.

But over the past 6 months, we are finding that more and more PCs (both XP and 7) are erroring on the update, forcing us to remote into the PC and run the update manually.

It also seems that once a PC refuses to push update, it will no longer accept any fuirther push updates. You can see how much of an issue this can be when several hundred PCs refuse to update and we only have 2 people to manually do the update.

Not only that, the problem is further compounded by the fact that if Flash is not updated, it just simple stops working, Can anyone explain to me why this is, or is this only something that happens when pushing the updates?

As you can guess, Flash is an integral piece to many teacher's lesson plan, and not having it operational is causing us quite a bit of disturbance.

Thanks.

[robchi72]

This is basically the same scenario that we have. Leaving installs and updates, even if minor flash updates, in the hands of our users is not an option.

[robchi72]

Does anyone have a solution for this? ...preferably that can be done via Group Policy.