RedFlameOut’s Musings

I ran into an interesting issue with the Adobe Flash player in both Internet Explorer 7 (IE) and FireFox 2.0.5.

When I would navigate to YouTube.com to look at videos, an error popped up saying I did not have the latest Flash player with a link to install in IE. If I clicked the link, the install failed and the example Flash jobject would display a red X. FireFox popped up the yellow attention bar at the top. Installing the plugin from there did not correct the problem.

Adobe’s web site worked flawlessly but other sites with Flash either complained about needing the latest Flash player or the Flash objects on the page failed.

After investigating through Google searches, I was not any closer to fixing the issue than when I started. Even after uninstalling and reinstalling the Flash player, the issue continued. Frustrating!

I noticed that in Internet Explorer, a particular path listed the files in some of the pop up errors:

C:\Windows\System32\Macomed\Flash

Navigating to this location, I found two Flash utilities — one for Internet Explorer and one for Mozilla/Netscape browsers like FireFox.

Screen Shot

NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe is for FireFox and FlashUtil9d.exe is for Internet Explorer. I ran each and they indicated an update was available. I let them update and Flash player begain working in both browsers. The utilities indicated a reboot was necessary but it worked without the reboot for me.

I hope this helps others as it took me a couple of hours to figure this one out.