Flash 9 Installed but not detected

I have installed flash player 9 on my computer. according to adobe's website it's installed however any time i go to a website requiring flash it says that i need to download flash player 9. i have tried to uninstall and reinstall several times yet the same symptoms occur. the weird thing is that there are two user accounts on my computer. one of them has no problem with flash and the other account does. i've tried setting up a new user account to see if flash would work on another account and it will not. all of the user accounts have administrator rights. i am really confused at this point and don't know what else to try. i am also running ie7 and this problem didn't start until i downloaded ie7. it seems that there are a lot of people out there having trouble with flash 9 and ie7. i have tried to email adobe about the issue but i have not heard back from them. does anyone have any suggestions. thanks for your help in advance!