Flash player installation woes (XP SP3)

[Guest]

Having problems with flash installation on my mother's pc, which appears to be common from searching for solutions online, yet have not been able to find a resolution.

At some point flash had stopped working, though am not sure exactly when. Presumably either after an automatic flash update, or when a boot failure bsod needed to be fixed. When checking the Firefox addons, flash no longer appeared, but it was clearly still installed on the pc and also appeared in the control panel.

Tried the common suggestion of doing a fresh install, by uninstalling and manually removing all remnants of flash, and reinstalling. If installing the latest flash, the installer would reach around 70 or so percent, and then fail. If installing an older version (in case the issue was with the latest flash release), the same thing would happen but it would also state that flashupdateservice.exe could not be installed.

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[jeromiec83223024]

Try the links to the offline installers are at the bottom of the guide:

https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/installation-problems-flash-player-windows.html

[Guest]

I do believe I tried that and it had the same outcome, though I will try again tomorrow when I visit her.

I'm also going to try installing with Windows in Safe Mode.

[jeromiec83223024]

Yeah, try that first.

If it doesn't work, try this:

Performing a Clean install of Flash Player on Windows:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/928315

If you get to a point in the process where you're not able to proceed (you lack permissions to delete something), that's a good sign that the filesystem is corrupted.

Check for and repair any errors on the hard disk.  Disk corruption can be a good indication that the disk is dying, so before you give it a good workout, you might want to back up anything critical (pictures, documents, etc.).  If you're doing it on the cheap, dropbox and google offer free cloud storage. 

Check your hard disk for errors - Windows 7:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2641432

At that point, reboot and try to delete the thing that you were stuck on.  If it still won't delete, this utility usually gets the job done for me:

Unlocker - Free download and software reviews - CNET Download.com‌

After installing Unlocker, right-click on the file and choose Unlock, then delete it.  That was probably the corrupted file that was giving you problems.

Once you've finished the clean uninstall, then just download a new copy of the installer and run it:

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer

Hopefully that gets you going.  Good luck!