Shockwave/Flash Player crashes with every browser...Ugh.

[Beartooth14]

I can't find a solution in this forum although a lot of people seem to be asking this question. Flash crashes constantly and it doesn't matter if I use Chrome, Firefox or IE. It's quite unbearable. I don't have multiple Flash players and if an add-on is causing this, I can't draw a link between it crashing and me disabling them. I've scanned for malware and gotten rid of anything found. No viruses that my virus protection reports. The problem just gets worse. It used to be occasionally, then multiple times a day, now its pretty much anytime I want to use Flash...which seems to be constantly. It freezes my computer then an error message comes up and says Shockwave player has crashed. I have updated shockwave and flash, so I have the most recent versions....any solutions?

Thanks in advance.

[jeromiec83223024]

If your machine had a recent malware infection, you might want to consider backing up your critical files and starting fresh.  It takes time for antivirus and anti-malware packages to discover and push signatures for new viruses, and it's standard practice to deploy new malware to ensure that an attacker maintains their foothold on a compromised machine.

If it was my personal machine, I would back up any critical data files, wipe the machine and re-install everything from pristine sources.  Not exactly convenient, but you can be reasonably sure that the system is running the software you expect (discounting the possibility of malware that compromises the system BIOS).

That said, there's not a lot of actionable information here.  I'd recommend uninstalling Flash Player and re-installing fresh.  You actually have three different Flash Players -- there's an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer, the NPAPI plug-in for Firefox and the PPAPI Flash Player for Chrome.  The PPAPI Flash Player for Chrome is totally encapsulated -- it doesn't even share settings.

SO... malware aside, the next most likely culprit is graphics drivers.  Each of the independent Flash Player installations attempts to use a hardware accelerated feature (like video playback), but the driver crashes.  Typically updating the graphics drivers would resolve this, or you can experiment with disabling hardware acceleration.  How do I disable or enable hardware acceleration? Windows: how do I update the device driver for my video/display adapter?