How Do I Force a Reinstall of Flash Player in Windows 8.1 Internet Explorer

[Guest]

I use a personal finance package which uses Flash Player for the graphs etc.

When this stopped working correctly with the latest version of FP the advice was to uninstall FP (using the uninstaller from a page linked to Adobe) which I followed. Unfortunately, although the page was similar to this one How do I do a clean install of Flash Player? it did not have the big red warning about not doing steps 4 and 5 if you have Windows 8.1.  (link has been removed by the finance software developer as they have updated the software instead).

My problem seems to be that I did steps 4 & 5 (after taking ownership of the files) and now cannot install FP.

• The Adobe site says that it is part of Windows update
• The Adobe website confirms that it is not installed in IE
• The previous version of FP supplied by the financial software support will not install because it sees a later version
• I have tried "disabling" IE to cause it to uninstall and the "enabled" it to reinstall it

Any advice would be appreciated as I seem to be going around in circles.

PS. Please modify this link as it does not contain the warning about Windows 8 / 8.1: Uninstall Flash Player | Windows

[_maria_]

Hi 4ndyed,

You are correct.  The Uninstall Flash Player | Windows page should have such a warning.  I have forwarded your post/suggestion to the content folks.

Unfortunately, there may not be an easy way to fix this as Microsoft considers the files associated with the embedded version of Flash Player to be a protected system files and the reason why the files are locked to keep it from being deleted/uninstalled.  You may want to try uninstalling the Security Update for Internet Explorer Flash Player, via the Control Panel updates (Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Windows Update\View update history > look for the entry 'Security Update for Internet Explorer Flash Player for Windows...') and then installing the update again.  Links to the Microsoft Internet Explorer installer are posted at the bottom of the Flash Player Issues | Windows 8 page in the ''Update Internet Explorer to get latest version of Flash Player' section. 

--

Maria

[Guest]

Hi Maria,

I had already tried that suggestion. I found it in response to a similar problem, but it did not work.

I have another windows 8.1 tablet / notebook (transformer). Would copying these files across to my problem tablet work? I know little about Windows 8.1.