Flash Player 11.1 ActiveX not consistently installing via GPO

[Joey Hogan]

We've recently decided to push out Adobe Flash Player 11 to our computers, as a number of sites were starting to require it. As our network is rather large (about 2800 computers), we use GPO to assign applications such as Flash Player and Reader to our computers.

The GPO is setup to uninstall previous versions of Flash Player before installing. We assigned it to a test group of about 100 Windows XP 32-bit computers, and had no issues with it, so we linked the GPO to the rest of our domain.

However, now we're noticing issues where the GPO is uninstalling previous versions of Flash Player, installing the plugin version of Flash Player 11.1, but not installing the ActiveX version. This leaves the computers without Flash Player available in Internet Explorer.

Looking through the event logs on the affected computers, it appears to be getting a return code 1603 (fatal error during installation), but I can't make any other determination of what's going on.

This is only affecting computers running 32-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows 7, however the issue seems more occurant on our Win7 computers. I was wondering if anyone else has expirienced this issue, and what the resolution is?

[chris.campbell]

Hi Joey,

Would it be possible to get the FlashInstall.log and MSI install logs for a sample of the systems that are failing?  I can pass that info along to our installer team for their inspection.  Feel free to email me directly at ccampbel@adobe.com.

Thanks,

Chris