Flash player crashing in Google chrome, but not Firefox

I'm running Windows 7, my graphics card is an nVidia 285 GTX - and yes, I have the most recent graphics drivers (as of a couple weeks ago). My problem is this:

When loading any page with flash on it, the entire page will lock up for 10-15 seconds, before flash crashes entirely. I tried uninstalling flash player, but as google handles Chrome's version of flash player (not quite sure as to how exactly that works), pages with flash on them would still crash...so I resorted to using Firefox.

If I use Firefox, then any youtube video will lock up the entire browser for 15 seconds or so before I can do anything, as it plays in the background - audio plays, but the video is locked up. The video controls are then pretty laggy, and if I make it fullscreen, it takes 2-3 seconds to go fullscreen. When I take it out of fullscreen, it locks up the whole browser for 15 seconds again. I lived with this for about 2 weeks, but then as of 3 days ago, flash player started crashing in Firefox, so I gave up on Firefox and tried out Chrome again - only to find that suddenly flash player worked in Chrome all of a sudden! Hooray! Nope. It stopped working after about a day and a half, and went back to crashing, first only on random websites, but then on every website that had flash on it.

My friends don't have the issue on their computers using Chrome, or Firefox, but I do have a friend using Firefox who has the issue with Firefox locking up on youtube. My work computer has the issue with Chrome crashing on flash as well, and it has integrated graphics, I've also made sure its graphics drivers are updated, but it doesn't seem to help. I've even gone so far as to updated every other driver available and flash the BIOS, but to no avail.

If there's anything else that I can do to troubleshoot this further, please let me know, I really want to have a working flash player again.