Error in Shockwave Player version 12.2.3.183

Every time I visit a website with any type of ad on it, I get an error message that "Shockwave Flash may be busy or it may have stopped responding." If I click on "stop plugin" i get a warning across the top of my browser that "the Adobe Flash plugin has crashed." For the past few weeks it's been annoying because every time I try to view a new page, my entire browser (not just the tab in question) freezes up until the error message loads. It can take an entire minute to load a single page this way. But today, Firefox stops responding altogether when I try to load a page and I have to go to the Task Manager to kill it off. I'm now having the exact same problem in Internet Explorer.

I'm thoroughly confused, because I thought Flash was different from Shockwave Player, but all my Googling keeps leading me to the download page for Shockwave Player. So I went to Adobe's own Shockwave Player Help page. The first time, I clicked the yellow button to "see if I have Shockwave Player installed" and it said I did not. I actually checked to make sure I did, in fact, have it installed, and it was there, but I went through the whole process of installing it again anyway. Now it's telling me I don't have the latest version installed. Here's the kicker, though: It's telling me my version is 12.2.3.183 and the latest version is 12.1.9.159. Um...wouldn't 12.1.anything be older than 12.2.whatever? Regardless, I followed the steps to enable Shockwave Player in Firefox, and still the white box on the help page where you're supposed to see clouds, all I see is an empty white box with a "reload" arrow. Clicking the arrow does nothing. I also still have not solved my Flash crashing issue.

I'm using Windows Vista, Firefox version 43.0.4, Internet Explorer version 9, and Norton antivirus. I'm also having problems with Adobe Reader X "not responding" every single time I try to open PDF files (which is a real problem since I work in an office and I do a LOT of scanning and emailing), but if I wait 30-60 minutes (yes, I said minutes) I can usually view or print before it freezes up again. I'm never able to fill in forms, though; as soon as I click where I want the cursor to go, the program freezes up permanently and I have to use the Task Manager to close it.