Flash Player installed but not recognized...

My internet suddenly started running VERY slowly - like dial-up speed.  After investigating all the possible causes, I found that it was Adobe Shockwave that was causing it to run slow.  Once I uninstalled the add-on, internet was fast again.  But I have now discovered that many pages won't work because they require Flash Player.  So I downloaded and reinstalled Flash, but whenever I go to one of these sites, it still tells me that flash is required for the page to work.

After did some internet research on the problem that said that Windows won't allow Flash to work, and the way to fix the problem is to make sure Shockwave is enabled.  So now what do I do....Shockwave makes it run really slow, but I can't get 100s of webpages without it!?

Running Windows 7, IE9 64-bit, Adobe Flash 11.7