Flash constantly crashing (Firefox, Chrome, Spotify, etc.)

Unfortunately, I don't have a magic wand to wave.  We'll need to tackle the issues one at a time.  It's interesting that you're seeing brutal instability in three very distinct flavors of Flash Player (IE, Chrome and Firefox all use a different version of Flash Player).  We don't directly access hardware and in general shouldn't lock the whole system up.

Firefox:

Flash Player in Firefox on Win8+ has some problems, and I'd recommend that you avoid it for another couple months.  We're actively collaborating with Mozilla on improving that situation, but we're on a 4-week release cycle, and they're on a 6-week release cycle, so it's going to be a minute before that work is vetted and makes it to you.

I'm pretty sure I know what your crash dumps will look like, but you can do the following:

Go to about:crashes

Click the first few links

Give me the addresses from the resulting pages

Internet Explorer:

This one I'm interested in.  We're talking about IE11 on Win8.1, which is extensively tested by both Adobe and Microsoft, and we watch the telemetry closely.

I'm curious to know if disabling hardware acceleration in IE itself makes things better here:

How to enable or disable software rendering in Internet Explorer

If not, and you want to collect crash dumps and send them to me (you can just PM me with a link -- click my name, and use dropbox, adobe send‌, etc -- whatever is convenient):

You'll need to download DebugDiag 2 from Microsoft here:
Download Debug Diagnostic Tool v2 Update 1 from Official Microsoft Download Center

Then launch DebugDiag Collector

Download this rule file:

Shared Files - Acrobat.com

Hit Import in DebugDiag Collector and import the rule file.

If IE or Flash crashes, it will log the dump file in C:\Program Files\DebugDiag\Logs\Crashes.  When you've captured a few crashes (they'll end in .dmp), just zip the whole folder up and send it over.

If that's too much work, that's cool.  I'd skip the why and just go to the nuclear option:

Check the disk for errors (for real):

Caveat: Sometimes corrupted software is an early indicator that your disk is going bad.  It's wise to ensure that you have current working backups, especially if you have anything important on the machine.  Checking the disk for problems is a relatively safe operation, but will also give the disk a workout.  If it's on it's way out, you may not get a lot of additional warning.

http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2641432

Then do a clean install of Flash Player:

How do I do a clean install of Flash Player?

If IE (and I'm assuming that Spotify, like most apps is embedding an IE window) continues to blow up, then the log collection is certainly in order.  I should be able to give you a precise answer about what's going on and tell if you if it's our bug or something else.

Chrome:

Go to chrome://crashes

Submit the first few crashes

Give me the resulting bug numbers and I'll ask Google for any insight on what's going on there.

Thanks!

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