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JamesJoey1
Participating Frequently
November 10, 2010
Question

Flash Player AutoUpdate

  • November 10, 2010
  • 4 replies
  • 19365 views

First, how does Flash Player trigger it's auto update when I see nothing in Windows System Configuration's Startup tab, Start Menu's Startup folder and I don't see anything in Windows Scheduled Tasks that is related to Flash Player?

Second, how do I turn off the AutoUpdate feature?

Thanks,

James

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    4 replies

    A
    Anonymous
    March 22, 2011

    This one was an entertaining puzzle, it's probably been answered elsewhere but I thought I'd let curious people know. As someone mentioned, it is the plugin module (NPSWF32.DLL in case of Netscale/Mozilla/Opera plugin) that does the check; thing is, it does not prompt the user to update immediately (it would not be able to do so with the browser open and the DLL in use anyway), but rather it defers the update until the next restart -- by adding a registry entry in the HKLM (or HKCU, not positive)\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce key. The entry is named FlashPlayerUpdate and contains <system root>\System32\Macromed\Flash\FlashUtil<version>_Plugin.exe -update plugin -- presumably the same command line you would run if you wanted to update the player manually (without the hassle with opening and closing your web browsers).

    The reason you don't see it in registry or with system tools like msconfig.exe is that RunOnce autostart entries are deleted from registry immediately once they are executed. Normally such entries are used by driver and Windows installations to perform one-time initialization after a reboot (once the required services are started and drivers loaded). So you would have seen that entry with msconfig, had you looked at it after the update check (which the plugin does silently), but before the reboot!

    N
    nerf50000
    Participant
    March 24, 2011

    10 internets to you good sir!

    This is precisely what I was looking for, and I believe so was the original poster and it's not documented anywhere. It's actually a clever way of doing updates without having the updater start up as a separate process that runs forever on every startup (as seems to be customary and very very annoying these days), I just wish it was documented somewhere other than 'user our configurator, trust us it's disabled'.

    Thanks again!

    N
    nerf50000
    Participant
    November 12, 2010

    I just got the popup and I'm sick and tired of it launching out of nowhere, so I decided to post the question here and seems plenty people beat me to it; it's good to see I'm not the only one to say 'what the hell??'.

    To me this is a privacy/security concern, there is no documentation anywhere what process is resident, what it does, and when it starts. I would understand if it was part of the plugin that checked for updates when the browser is started... that would make sense since the settings are written probably somewhere in the browser/flash cache (hence the flash utility to set it up) but what starts it as soon as I turn on the PC?

    Does anyone have a support contract with Adobe so they can ask them? Does anyone from Adobe check these forums?

    Thanks guys!

    pwillener
    pwillener
    Legend
    November 12, 2010

    nerf50000 wrote:

    I just got the popup and I'm sick and tired of it launching out of nowhere

    So why don't you just disable it?

    N
    nerf50000
    Participant
    November 12, 2010

    Ok valid point on disabling the update but not entirely where I was going with it, apologies for the confusion; in any case for one it seems it re-enables itself every so often (I don't know where it writes settings to so I can't be sure I'm not deleting it or it's otherwise getting cleaned up) and for two my main concern is what reads the settings and launches the updater? I don't want to block the updater, I want to know what that process is, how it is triggered on launch and I want it gone, as it seems so do others.

    P.S. I looked through the obvious registry entries, startup, proceses, tasks... I found nothing.

    J
    JamesJoey1Author
    Participating Frequently
    November 11, 2010

    How do I get to the Global Settings???

    I right clicked on video content while it was playing and clicked 'Settings' but I see no tab for the

    update notification.

    James

    pwillener
    pwillener
    Legend
    November 11, 2010

    There is no Auto Update, just an update notification, which can be turned off at

    http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager05.html

    J
    JovetJ
    Participant
    November 11, 2010

    Thanks for the link to the configuration panel to turn it off.

    But the orignal poster's question I really want to know still stands:  How does Flashutil10k_plugin.exe get started at system startup?  What process launches it?  Where is this configuraiton information stored?  I was going to start my own thread asking this, but someone beat me to it.

    The fact this process runs doesn't really bother me, but the fact I have no idea why it runs does bother me.  Without knowing about the un-obvious configuraiton panel mentioned above, I'm clueless as to how to disable the updater otherwise.

    J
    JamesJoey1Author
    Participating Frequently
    November 11, 2010

    I posted this query on Microsoft Answer Forum.

    When I get a reply I'll check back.

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