Why CAN'T I change the settings in Flash Player Setting Manager?

[avik68375283]

Under the Updates, tab in my Flash Player's Setting Manager  does NOT currently offer CHOOSING (i.e. bulleting) the option of: "Allow Adobe to Install Updates (recommended)"-as, it is GREYED OUT...! WHY???

[Kratika Agarwal]

Please click on "change updates settings".It will get enabled.

[Guest]

Sorry, but that answer is not helpful at all. There is no "change updates settings" field. I have the same problem when I go to updates. All 3 settings are greyed out and "notify me to install updates is marked" with black circle which I can't change to auto update plus it doesn't actually notify me to update. I have to go to the website to manually update and have to check from time to time if there was an update by going to the website. You seem to be as helpful as Microsoft, probably same people in both.

[divya010193]

Hi,

Which operating system are you using? On windows 10/8, flash player updates for Internet Explorer/Edge are handled by Microsoft only. Hence you are not able to change the update method.

If you have other player types installed, (NPAPI/PPAPI) please let us know!

Thanks

[Guest]

Well, this is helpful. I use Win 8.1 so that answers that question, thanks.

[jeromiec83223024]

What browser are you using?

[Guest]

Chrome, I.E., Firefox and standalone Flash Player.

[jeromiec83223024 · Accepted solution]

Chrome is it's own beast, so settings aren't going to propagate to/from the Flash installation in Chrome.  This is a design restriction imposed by Chrome, and stems from the fact that Flash Player only has mediated access to the filesystem.  Flash thinks it's reading and writing to the shared settings file, but it's actually being redirected transparently to a Chrome-controlled location on the filesystem.  You can set Chrome-specific settings by right-clicking on some Flash content and choosing Global Settings from within Chrome.  If Chrome's settings are also reverting after explicitly being set, you have two problems to solve.

The other browsers *do* use the shared settings file, and changes should be respected.  The vast majority of the time when I see these symptoms, it's a self-inflicted problem.  It's typically the result of a third-party "privacy" product that deletes "Flash Cookies", but they also nail the global settings preference file (settings.sol) in the process.  Since our preference file with all of your settings has been deleted, all we can do is create a new default one at next launch.

If you're 100% sure that this isn't the scenario you're in, then most likely the filesystem is corrupt, or we're otherwise unable to read or write to that file (again, outside of filesystem corruption, it would boil down to some third-party interference with normal operations).

If you think the file is corrupted, the first thing you should do is backup any critical data on the machine.  Filesystem corruption can be an early indicator of disk failure, and the next step is going to give the disk a good workout.  Better safe than sorry.  There are plenty of free/inexpensive online backup services, plus the traditional offline backup routes like external disks, etc.  I highly recommend this step.

Once your backup house is in order, you'll want to scan for and repair any problems with the filesystem.

Check your hard disk for errors - Windows 7:

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

At that point, you should be able to just delete the file.  Deleting and recreating it probably isn't going to help if there's an underlying filesystem problem, and is effectively what would have happened already if you've run the uninstaller and then reinstalled Flash Player.

See if you can delete the following file:

95/98/ME/2K/XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\settings.sol
Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player\settings.sol

If you can't, the filesystem is definitely messed up.  I usually have good luck with Unlocker, but there are a few utlities described here:

http://www.guidingtech.com/10175/tools-to-delete-locked-files-in-windows/

[Guest]

Thanks Jeromie, but if you didn't notice the question was about not being to set flash player to auto update or even manually. That means when you go to Control Panel and click on Flash Player icon -> updates, it was all greyed out. And divya_1993 already gave the answer. Which browser I use makes no difference as my system runs on Win 8.1 which means that Flash Player is handled by Microsoft. On the other hand for whatever reason, it does not auto update standalone Adobe Flash Player. I was using version 23 and wondered why it didn't update. And couldn't change settings in control panel. So I had to go to Adobe site and do it manually. As for the flash on websites it does auto update. the only problem is with the standalone Flash Player and wish it had auto update in for example help tab instead of just having "About Adobe Flash Player".

[jeromiec83223024]

Ah yeah, I got stuck on the subject line.  If I have an hour to kill, I'll blow through 50 posts, but I'm shamelessly skimming.  I remember reading your post, but I think I just brain cramped on this one. 

You're right, the standalone player is it's own, completely standalone thing.  The context menu suggestion is interesting, but very few people actually download it in general.  We know that people use it to play games, but it was originally implemented for building interactive CD-ROM content and kiosks, where they're relatively isolated and are playing trusted content.  It's also just this floating .exe file, and not an application that's installed and registered on the system, so there's not a good predictable location or registry entry that would tell the updater where to look.

Adobe AIR was really intended to replace the standalone player as the supported avenue for developers to publish desktop and mobile applications based on Flash technology (and it offers *far* superior capabilities), so the SAP really exists at this point to support legacy use-cases, and is something that we don't invest a lot of resources into.  We *did* do some work recently to add this kind of available update information to the browser plugin's context menu, so it might be a fairly easy job to wire it into the SAP as well.  I'm definitely happy to broach that conversation with the right folks.  It's probably pretty low on the priority list, but if it happens to be super easy, there's a decent chance that we'd just knock it out.

[Guest]

Where there's will, there's a way