Internet Explorer 9 & Flash Player 11.5.502.110

[SHTechs]

Hey,

Since 2 weeks now we've had issues with the Flash Player 11.5.502.110 ActiveX on our Windows 7 machines,

Sites that contain any flash material are not able to load unless we disable the flash player addon in the Internet Explorer 9 Addons-list, trying to load a page containing flash causes the whole browser to freeze and eventually crash after about a minute.

For some reason having 11.5.502.110 installed, going to www.adobe.com and checking for an update seems to say "Yeah you need to update!" and it updates to 11.5.502.110 once again, was there some broken release of this version that has been hotfixed and requires re-downloading?

I've got around 200 machines with this issue right now.

Machines affected by this issue are running:

Windows 7 Enterprise SP 1

Internet Explorer 9

Flash Player 11.5.502.110

[MrX1980]

Hello

try it again with:

a) http://labsdownload.adobe.com/pub/labs/flashplatformruntimes/flashplayer11-5/flashplayer11-5_uninsta...

b) http://labsdownload.adobe.com/pub/labs/flashplatformruntimes/flashplayer11-5/flashplayer11-5_install...

[jeromiec83223024]

Moved to the Using Flash Player forum, as this is not related to the Flash Player 11.5 Beta.

There's not a lot of detail to work with here, but I'm thinking it's a permission thing.  I'm assuming your workgroups are members of a Windows domain, probably have some Group Security Policies in play, and are not local Administrators. 

As a troubleshooting step, it would be interesting to know if this resolves the issue:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4323109

Here's the full installation troubleshooting guide:

http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/installation-problems-flash-player-windows.html#main-pars_hea...

Getting the installation logs from a machine experiencing this problem would be interesting.

The Flash Player Administrator's Guide is also an excellent resource, with recommendations on how to best distribute and manage Flash Player installations in your organization:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player_admin_guide.edu.html

Hopefully this is a good start.  Let us know how it works out, and provide us with as much specific detail as possible if you're still stuck.

Thanks!

[SHTechs]

Hi,

Thanks for moving the topic, I've no clue how I managed to post it in the beta section.

Anyhow,

Yes none of our users have any administrative rights, they can't install anything other than browsers pretty much.

I however fail to see how this is connected to the fact that various flash player versions cause major slowdowns on our machines.

Yesterday I noticed a machine running 11.4 and it also had the same issue with any page containing anything with flash would take forever to attempt to load until IE eventually crashes.

The machines we first encountered this problem on had their flash player installed between the 8th and 11th of November 2012, the version number said 11.5.502.110.

We are running DELL KACE as our computer management tool, I did not receive any update to my Flash Player there until 1 week after this date, at around the 14th / 15th of November if we went back to adobe.com and tried to "Update" flash player it'd say "Hi, there's a new version" and download 11.5.502.110 again thus fixing the problem.

So the question at hand is, was there some early release of the 11.5.502.110 that was broken and a hotfix was deployed without changing the version number? I honestly refuse to believe we had over 200 machines randomly fail installations and require us to re-install them from the homepage.

Seeing as this same error is now appearing on machines running 11.4 releases I'd love to know what is causing this, there's no guarantee that this is even caused by Flash Player itself unless there's a mixture of problems appearing when Internet Explorer 9 works together with certain releases of Flash Player.

For now all I can do to save my feet is to deploy 11.5.502.110 again and hope that it overwrites the 11.4 versions.

[jeromiec83223024]

Your original description says that the browser hangs for a minute, then crashes on sites containing Flash.  This sounds like classic symptoms for a permission problem. 

I'm guessing that the browser tries to invoke the player, the player can't run/respond, the browser is stuck waiting for a response, it eventually times out, but everything's in a bad state now, and it takes the browser down.

We don't test DELL KACE for deployment, and my guess is that the permission issue is related to the deployment mechanism and/or some combination of group security policies in play.

If running the fix permissions scripts in my first response resolves the issue, we've narrowed it down to a set of registry keys that aren't getting set properly.  At that point, we can check the list of what the script fixes against an affected machine to figure out what's not getting set.

If it's a bug in our MSI installer, we'll get it filed and fixed in a future release (although we tend to get a gigantic wave of bug reports and forum posts when there's a widespread problem, and with Flash Player 11.5.502.110 having been in the market for a few weeks already, I'm not seeing a corresponding trend there). 

If it's a problem with KACE, or with how Flash Player is configured for deployment through KACE, we/you have a very clear set of actionable repro steps to give to Dell. 

If it's a Group Security Policy preventing the right keys from getting written, you'll have a good place to start troubleshooting your policy configuration.

If setting the registry permissions with the script on an affected machine doesn't resolve the problem, something else is probably going wrong with the installation. 

I'd recommend trying to uninstall and re-installing on a single affected machine.  If that resolves the issue, we should be able to diff the installtion logs between that machine and an affected machine and figure out what's happening.

[SHTechs]

We'll have to look into all those things during the future,

However what I find strange is the fact that all the machines that we've encountered problems on were all installed manually, by going to www.adobe.com logged on as administrator.

DELL KACE was never involved in the mess until we needed to fix this problem asap, so deployment was the obvious choice rather than manually running out to 200 machines one at a time.

But seeing now how even older versions have encountered issues, has there been any change to what permissions are needed for flash player?

Which registry / policy values would users have permisions to in order to avoid this issue?

[jeromiec83223024]

To my knowledge, there were no changes introduced between Flash Player 11.4.402.287 and 11.5.502.110 that would have caused this.  Without enough information to understand what the actual failure is, I can't tell you how to avoid it.

This issue bugs me, because I *do* regularly hear from a trickle of people every time we ship an update -- usually 2 - 3 people, primarily corporate users with an undisclosed set of Group Security Policies, that something went bad with their installation.  Uninstalling and re-installing, or running the permission fix script usually takes care of it.  Unfortunately, that doesn't leave us with much in the way of actionable detail.

My guess is that there's either a third-party software security suite or a set of group policy options that causes our installation to fail. 

It would probably be easy to resolve, if I could reproduce it.  We don't see this problem on our corporate Adobe machines (we have 10k+ managed desktops in-house), or in our test environments.  We test installation extensively with every release, and are installed successfully on something like 1.12 billion machines. 

When you have some time, it would be great if I could get a VM snapshot of a machine that reproduces the problem, or enough information that I can build an affected machine from scratch.  It's definitely something we'd be happy to investigate and follow up on.

Best of luck!

[mtrussell07]

I am having the same issue!!! After update going to webpages with flash content sits at a white screen then crashed! Disabling the shockwaver addon will let me get right in. What is going on!?! i cant even revert back to the previous version because you guys a nazis with this!!!

[jeromiec83223024]

Have you tried the troubleshooting steps that I recommended in this thread?

[jeromiec83223024]

Also, to revert to a previous version, use the uninstaller first, then install the older version.  We do this to prevent attackers from tricking users into accidentally downgrading to a older, vulnerable version of Flash Player.

Here are the instructions on how to uninstall:

http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-windows.html

Here's an archive of older player version:

http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html

I'd recommend that you downgrade to the latest Flash Player 10.3 (as of today, 10.3.183.43).  We maintain Flash Player 10.3 with security patches for customers that don't want/need new features, and would prefer to remain insulated from the risk associated with new work.

[AshiOni]

We are having the exact same issue. We have hundreds of workstations down, disable or remove flash 11.5.502.110 and everything goes back to normal.

However this is a major issue for us as all of our employees use a web based application that requires both IE and flash to login / punch out / get paid, etc.

Flash player 11.5.502.110

IE 9

Both win7 32/64 (mostly 32 bit)

I will add that we are in a virtualized desktop environment. I haven't ruled this out as a factor however this has been in place for years now without any kind of issues like this in the past.

We have done all of the linked work arounds / fixes and wild suggestions we have been able to find so far.

Needless to say this is a major political issue where I work because our employees are unable to retrieve their pay checks.

EDIT

Something odd I noticed - This DOES NOT appear to be a problem for INTRAnet web sites or web sites added to the trusted web sites zone within IE 9.

I'd also like to add that the outlined problem DOES brick all other web sites, not just those with adobe flash content. To test this I have tried to go to simply HTML pages we posted and are able to produce the same results.

Message was edited by: AshiOni

[SHTechs]

I was messing around on yet another machine that I found out had the issue and suddenly stuff worked out in the end, I have no idea what made it work but here's what was done.

I began by booting up the machine that the user said she had issues with connecting to any page using flash, in our case the sites we used to test this was www.arla.se and www.eniro.se

Both of these pages will crash the browser on machines with this issue at our site.

Logging on with the local administrator account on the machine would have all pages working with no issue, I checked if the shockwave plugin was disabled and it wasn't, everything was enabled and the sites would load.

However, logging on to a regular user account with no administrative rights would still have the issue, tried this on several accounts.

I proceeded to try running the fix that was linked, which clearly in the video he stated the fix being for 2 completely different issues, the fix did nothing, the issue remained.

At this point I decided to check out whether it could have been related to permissions as admin accounts (both local and my domain admin account which is set to have local administrative rights on the machine in question) would have no issues with loading pages.

So I go to the c:\Windows\SysWoW64\Macromed\Flash folder, grant my regular user full permissions to it, but the issue remained and I removed the permissions from this folder. At this point I logged out, let the other user log on to her account and suddenly pages would work with shockwave enabled.

Are there any permissions related to the fact of Flash Player fixing itself if it's allowed to? With the events that I described above there's nothing to follow up on, it just macigally started working or flash player is smart enough to fix itself if I give it permissions to do so.

Also how can this only affect users and not admins?

[chris.campbell]

Do you notice any difference if you disable protected mode in Internet Options?

Open internet explorer.

Click on Tools menu and select Internet Options.

Select Security Tab in the Internet options windows.

Select Internet from the zone settings.

Uncheck Enable Protected Mode option to disable the protection from Security for this zone.

Hit Apply and Ok

[GeoMG]

Chris, I did my update this morning, JST, and right away I couldn't get MSN mail to load.  Then another site, and another, and on and on.

Lucky for me I have another computer with all stuff working and could finish urgent work.

So later today I have time to poke around and I have found that doing the "Turn Off Protected Mode" trick works.  Vista Ultimate and IE9.  Previous version of Flash Player worked just fine, so it seems obvious the trouble is with this 11.5 version.

So am I stuck having to keep protected mode off?

if so, what is the danger of that?  I mean, I keep getting a banner down at the bottom just about when every page loads to warn me that protected mode is off, so Microsoft folks must think it's important.

What do you reckon I should do?

Thank you.

[chris.campbell]

@GeoMG - Is your user account an admin or standard account?  I've seen this occur with both types of accounts, but it seems like it's more prevalent with standard user accounts.

When you get a chance, could you add a comment/vote to the following bug report?

https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3321659

There are some workarounds listed there, but this issue has me scratching my head.  We've been unable to reproduce this problem internally and we've had reports that some of the newest releases fix this issue...  However, in your situation this doesn't seem to be the case.  I'd recommend keeping protected mode off for the time being, you might also want to try updating to our latest labs release to see if that helps.

Here's Microsoft's explanation of what Protected Mode does: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/What-does-Internet-Explorer-protected-mode-do

[GeoMG]

I appreciate you responding here, Chris, but about an hour and a half before your post up there I thought it wise to start my own thread on this topic and something about the registry.

Anyway, on the affected unit I was using an account with admin rights.

I'll look at that bug report, but I have two additional questions in my other post:  How long this problem and the registry.  Please.

I saw that MS article while I was doing my homework, but I also saw that it was indicated for IE7 & IE8 and maybe I was rushed and thought I'd go look for an IE9 KB, or something.  I can't say as I gave it a second read, which it may need, I suppose, as you reference that only.

But, Chris, as it's your company that is recommending the turning off of the protected mode tool, I am asking what you tech folks at Adobe have ascertained as the consequences of that action?  I mean, if it were so unsafe, then you wouldn't recommend that, right?

Maybe you'll state I am responsible for the decision, and you are right, but the background on your own decision there at Adobe to make the recommendation might be helpful to those of us that are weighing the pros and cons of this.  There's a lot of homework at our end, so maybe y'all can help us out a bit.

Anyway, I do appreciate the open line of communication here.  Thank you.

[SHTechs]

Alright, this is getting ridiculous now,

Today I received yet another report of a machine with the same issue, internet explorer 9 crashes when the user attempts to open pages such as www.arla.se or www.eniro.se as well as various other pages containing any flash objects.

I tried the usual, re-installing flash player and installing the latest one, the issue remains.

I tried unisntalling 11.5 and installing the 11.6 BETA, the issue would still remain and at that point I couldn't uninstall the BETA without running the uninstaller fix several times, becasue any installment afterwards would claim flash was already installed at a later version than the one I attempted to install.

If I enter the addon-management for IE and disable the "Shockwave Flash Object" then all of a sudden everything works fine, however entering sites such as YouTube, I get notifications sayin I need a new version of flash player in order to watch this movie etc, yet playing the clips seem to work fine.

So at this moment I've got two choices, either I uninstall flash player completely and leave my machines flash-less or I try to explain to my users that they need to disable the shockwave flash object, which seems to be a user-localized setting. At this point all the flags saying you need to update flash etc will swarm my first-line and I'll probably have my head cut off.

This has been going on for well past a month now and this thread has been hijacked beyond recognition, at this very moment I have no idea whether it's Adobe or Microsoft I should decapitate for letting this issue still be around since early november 2012. Seeing as there's no logic behind the error at all and microsoft only blames Adobe for this issue then I don't know.

And for some reason no Adobe employee seems to be able to re-create this error which I was told at the start of this thread that:

"This issue bugs me, because I *do* regularly hear from a trickle of people every time we ship an update -- usually 2 - 3 people" All of a sudden my thread is swarmed by far more than 2-3 people who are having the same issue.

I've ran every possible fix that I've been linked so far, I've tried every single version of flash player from 10.3 to 11.6 (Whereas the older versions barely wants to install)

My techinician colleges have been disabling this shockwave flash object on well past 100 machines so far and I've got multitudes of furious users complaining that they need to see the annoying notification about flash player needing to upgrade and what not.

Fix this problem, or at least find me the reason why it's occuring!

[jeromiec83223024]

Again, you have a complex environment and a unique problem.  It's distinct from the typical problems we hear about on single-machine installations in the end-user forums. 

We've tried to walk you through a number of steps to identify a root-cause, but have not met with success, and have not been able to get the kind of detailed logs we would need to conduct an effective analysis.  In absence of useful data, we've made a number of guesses in an attempt to narrow down the possible root causes, but that has clearly been frustrating for you.

The Adobe Enterprise Support team is experienced with complex environments, and can provide you with the level of in-depth analysis and expertise required to identify and resolve the issue in your environment.  Because this issue is causing disruption in your organization, and you need a timely resolution, I would highly recommend opening a support case.

You can contact the Enterprise Support group here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/programs/enterprise/

[Overall_Genossenschaft]

Hi all,

We got stuck with his problem too.

We have an windows7 image and publish adobe with MS system center essentials.

1) Workstations who were imaged long ago (windows7 No SP) and started with orignial flashplayer versions 11.2 or older and from then on were frequentlty updated (incl. Windows7 SP1) to finally the newest Flash Version 11_5_502_110 everything works fine. There are no Flash Website crashes or else problems under Admin and Domain user accounts.

2) Workstations  imaged with our new Image with Windows7SP1 are getting directly Version 11_4._xxx_xxx or 11_5_502_110 of Adobe Flash. In this Case we run into the same Problem as described above. Result: Flash Websites work under the Admin Account. Domain User: they Crash or you have to disable the Plugin under IE, then it works fine (without flash components).

After hours of analysing and testing i found, that there is a missing dll under the macromed  flash folder. I compared the Macromed Flash Folder of Workstation 1) and 2) and on WS 2) there was the apropriate 'Flashutil_11_5_502_110_ActiveX.dll' File missing.  Suprisingly the Flashinstall.txt log under WS 2) shows that the dll should be installed in the macromed flash folder.

I copied the missing dll (without dll-registration or so) with Admin rignts from WS 1) to WS 2) and no crashes or slow loading Flash Websites anymore for Domain Users Acconts. It seems that only the apropriate dll was missing.

[jeromiec83223024]

This is super helpful, thanks for the feedback.  Would you mind PMing me with a copy of the failed installation log?

[Guest]

I was having the same issue on Win7 IE9 machines, machines are built with latest Flash Player installed (mixture of v11.4 & v11.5) and then sysprepped and the image captured for deployment.

When the image is deployed any non admin user has difficulty launching websites with Flash content, (in my case I tested using www.bbc.co.uk). To resolve this I was reinstalling Flash Player as I believed it was something to do with the Sysprep process causing a problem with the initial Flash install. After reading through various forums I then started disabling protected mode in ie9 for Internet Zone believing that to be the issue but after reading your post I have looked at permissions to the C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\ folder and subsequently given domain users full permission (modify permissions will suffice for this) to this folder and so far this has resolved the issue without having to reinstall flash or disable protected mode in IE9.

[jeffP505]

Hi Overall_Genossenschaft

I think you are a genius. I had one w2008 terminal server working and one not, both  on 11.4. Upgraded both to 11.5 but made no difference.

Checked Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash and the dll was missing on the "broken" one. straight copy over and it seems to work!

It will get properly tested tomorrow.

Thank you very much indeed.

Adobe should give you some free licenses for all your work.

Jeff

[jeromiec83223024]

This issue should be resolved in Flash Player 11.6, which ships shortly.  I'd encourage you to make sure that Flash Player 11.6 continues to work for you as expected.

You can download the beta at:

http://www.adobe.com/go/flashplayerbeta

[alefil]

I am having a simlar issue...

I configured Windows 7 Enterprise x64 recently and used sysprep so that we could capture an image with WDS. I have done this successfully since the release of Windows 7. I include all the typical plug-in/add-ons such as Flash/Shockwave/Air/Java/Silverlight. I built an image last week and discovered that IE9 was freezing up. I thought it was an issue with my imaging process, so I went through and followed my build sheet. Meticulously following each step. I tested IE9 before I ran sysprep and captured my image, it was working fine. I captured the image and pushed it to a couple of test machines. IE9 freezes up again like it did in my first image.

Then we disabled all the add-ons. IE9 started working. We turned on each add-on one at a time. As soon as we turned on Shockwave Flash Object (Version 11.5.502.146) IE9 begins to have issues again. Websites become unresponsive, and IE9 asks to close. Occasionally it will get through to a website after a long time. We have narrowed this down to Shockwave Flash Object add-on. I used the uninstaller from your website and uninstalled. Then I reinstalled and it works fine. Something has changed with Shockwave/Flash and it doesn't want to work after sysprep is run on our machines.

This seems to affect IE9. Whether it's the IE9 version of Flash or not, I don't know. Firefox doesn't seem to have any issues with the current version of Firefox and Flash. As far as I can tell something in Flash is breaking during the Sysprep process. We really need to include Flash in our images, we have done so in the past wihout incident. What has changed?

[chris.campbell]

@alefil - Were you able to give our 11.6 beta a try to see if it's been resolved for you?

http://www.adobe.com/go/flashplayerbeta