Problems Updating to Adobe Flash 9.0 r115

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I use Firefox, IE7, and Opera, in that order.  I remember wanting to try a game in Kongregate that wanted me to upgrade my Flash player, which I found odd since I knew I recently upgraded to Flash Player 9.0, although my revision number was perhaps somewhat out of date.   After a while, I read about the current revision of Flash having several security fixes and the various problems people have been wrestling with to upgrade their Flash version, and decided it was time to do an upgrade myself.

My first order of business was to upgrade the Flash player in Firefox.

Since I already tried the straightforward “download new installer, upgrade” route, and knew it didn’t work, I tried using the “Adobe Flash Uninstaller“, then tried going to a Flash site, which I was still able to view (so it obviously didn’t remove the Firefox plug-in).

I went to my “..\Firefox\plugins” folder and renamed “NPSWF32.dll” to simulate deleting it, but Flash still seemed to work.  Given this, I decided to search for other instances of “NPSWF32.dll”.

Turns out, I have a copy of “NPSWF32.dll” in my “..\windows\system32\Macromedia” folder.  I tried renaming that, but I couldn’t co’z it was in use (even though I already closed all my browsers), which seemed to imply that that was the DLL Firefox used in my machine.

I was pretty sure that a public location like that should’ve been handled by the uninstaller, so I tried running the Flash uninstaller again and read the “Details”.  I was that it “unregistered” the DLL in my system32 folder, but it didn’t seem to remove it.  I ran it again, and then it was told it was deleted. I ran it again, then was told the folder was deleted.  Since I also read that there were files that would be deleted upon restarty, I restarted.

This removed Flash from all my browsers.  Now I ran the Flash installer, which replaced
“NPSWF32.dll” in my “..\windows\system32\Macromedia” folder.  As expected, Flash in Firefox was working again.  Unexpectedfly, it was IE7 that didn’t have it working.

I tried going to the “Get Flash Player” site but after clicking and saying “yes” to the ActiveX install prompt, I saw a simple animation.  When I tried testing Flash in Kongregate, it wasn’t installed yet.

I tried “Get Flash Player” again, same thing.  I was wating my network activity to see if I was downloading anything, but activity was sparse, and I couldn’t tell if any download was happening at all.

So, I tried going to the “Version test for Adobe Flash Player“, which prompted me if I wanted to install Flash (I thought I already did!).  After saying yes, it still didn’t work.

Apparently, “Get Flash Player” was conflicting with the installation attempted by “Version test for Adobe Flash Player“, so after restarting the browser and going directly to “Version test for Adobe Flash Player“, it Flash finally kicked in for IE7.

Testing Opera, no problems (lol).

So, from my experience, here are some things to try:

  • try to make sure that all browsers are closed (preferably a fresh boot) before running “Adobe Flash Uninstaller“
  • run “Adobe Flash Uninstaller” several times, rebooting when there are items to be deleted during startup, and making sure that after you try “Adobe Flash Uninstaller” again, it didn’t delete anything else except itself
  • Make sure that there are no other instances of “NPSWF32.dll”
  • install from the Flash installer
  • test Flash using “Version test for Adobe Flash Player“, installing from prompts from that page if needed
  • make sure you aren’t browsing any other Flash or Flash Installer when you try installing from “Version test for Adobe Flash Player” to prevent conflicts

Hopefully, your Flash update will be less annoying than mine.

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December 31, 2007 | Filed Under tech | Leave a Comment 

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