Flash9b.ocx crash once again

Case anyone cares, I uninstalled all patches from 8/14 to recent and still causes IE7 to Stop Working. If I Delete my history, I can get past the same page that consistently crashes if I just revisited it, so it seems flash it trying to retrieve cached media and maybe Vista is denying it access the second time around? I tried to find where these files are being saved off, but Vista's search and file system sucks. I know Vista has a new way to "protect" the computer from unwanted files being downloaded and puts files in secure folders, but I don't completely understand it. This is pretty ridiculous though, like Adobe programmed their plugin to work one way and MS changed the way it dealt with plugins and Adobe hasn't picked up on it yet. I think I saw one guy suggest creating a folder away from the System folder for the Flash player. I'm trying that next. The right click Run as Admin just opens IE with Protected Mode set to Off, so no wonder it works fine, there is no security for IE, so be careful using that on websites you don't trust. The same works if you add a site to your Trusted Sites, it opens that site with Protected Mode: Off. Course, that may be Duh to most, but just trying to be thorough.

Okay, I've tried most of these tips, including getting rid of the /2, trying ,2 and nothing, installing latest betas, uninstalling clean, etc., but IE still likes to stop working intermittenly whenever a flash video player shows up on a web page.

I'm on an AMD X2 4600, 4 GB Ram, Vista Ultimate 64 bit. Yeah, why go 64 bit, why make life hard, well, once you figure out how to use it, it is just like 32 bit and you can still run all the old and new games.

Anyway, for a crazy test, I right clicked the IE icon, and hit Run as Administrator, though techinically I don't think you can really do that as you can't go to the actual exe file and set it to run as admin permanently. IE boots up fine and I haven't gotten it to crash yet. A couple problems that come with this are video works, but no audio on some embedded videos. Luckily audio works on NFL.com and youtube.com, but some embedded video like on perezhilton.com (gf likes this site, not me...lol) has no sound. Also, my back and forth buttons on my mouse don't work within that browser. IE must be running something differently. This is the 32 bit version of IE 7 as well, 64 bit, no one makes any plugins for it.

Maybe that will help Adobe troubleshoot some things, but with all the testing I've done, this really does feel like a stupid protectionists thing for Vista. It just started happening to me a few updates ago, so I'm betting MS pushed out a patch that tightened up some issues with OCX files and the flash OCX file is bumping heads with IE at certain times.

Conspiracy theorist in me believes it happened right around the release of Silverlight, beginning of September. I know this thread started a long time ago, but I had similar issues in the beginning, having Vista since January. I was able to fix those and then this issue showed up in September. I'm not sure if someone tried this, I haven't gone through the 2 million posts on the subject yet, so forgive the obviousness if I reposted.

Oh, also if you disable the flash.OCX in Manage Add-Ons, it lets you surf just fine, no crashes, just can't use any flash content, surprise, surprise. Run as Admin has been my best fix so far. This might only work with Vista users as they are given the choice, not sure if XP has that option?

Today Microsoft has issued an upgrade for IE7 but I don't think there is a fix there for Flash ... to be continued ...

>>Finally, this all IS Very Sad. In 2000, I was a senior member of a consulting team that assisted Macromedia in establishing a Customer Loyalty Program. The fact that it has taken Adobe so long to accomplish so little on this problem, which probably affects hundreds of thousands of direct customers and their sites’ users worldwide on a daily basis, suggests that the concept was clearly a casualty of the acquisition<<


Clearly, this problem has not been afforded Priority I status. Its hard to imagine how any major company whos products are used by almost every major company in the country would allow one of their products, used on millions of desktops throughout corporate america, to routinely crash applications that were up and running on these desktops, without coming up with a bonafide fix. Until this fix is found, I would expect All available computing resources would be assigned this project. That this hasnt occurred seems to me to be a shocking case of disregard for their customers. It also seems like a terrific opportunity for someone to step in with an alternate product; one which says, 'Hey, no need to be saddled with this buggy, dysfunctional app... heres one that really works!!!' That this hasnt happened is probably testimony to the degree to which adobe is entrenched in Corporate Americal. Still, if this doesnt give companies pause before implementing any other Adobe products, Id be surprised and disappointed.

IE and all versions of flash are having problems crashing regardless of your graphics card or uninstalling and reinstalling directx and flash, it doesnt seem to matter what application is crashing , its a flash code incompatibility with IE...though i havent had problems viewing or listening to music, its other flash applications that crash IE, internet explorer has problems with the flash code period and no matter how often ( 500 times a day) i send error reports it goes unaddressed,... i could paste the errors all over here... i wish it was imporant enough to fix for windows xp since everyone knows that vista, though new, will be buggy for years and who wants to upgrade to a buggier version of windows, not me...updates from adobe need to be consistant with the programs run by both mac and pc users...IE needs to fix their end of the problem too though i dont think its been a priority, seems that its going to have to be a team effort, im pretty tired of losing my work, trying to surf the net and crashing, playing a game and getting a error...ive got a brand new graphics card, no problems there, occasionally lag will cause a problem with any application running, but this isnt the case for me... i think its important enough for coders to be on top of...lots of people depend on this stuff to work propperly.

Now that Adobe has re-enabled new posts… I have had 9.0.60.184 installed since 9/16/07. Net result is similar to other posts regarding the beta: fewer crashes (3), but not zero. Two did not result in “problem” displays; the most recent one did and attributed the cause to flash9e.ocx.

History / situation: I have had crashes for months with XP, IE6 & 7, and flash9b, c&d.ocx, often more than once daily, on a 512MB system. I average 4 IE7 windows open with about 4 to 8 tabs each. One tab always has a news feed using Flash for constant updates of available video (like espn.com does), but about half of all tabs have banner ads using Flash.

Keeping YouTube open for extended periods (1-2 hours) used to cause crashes without fail. This no longer happens. Nor do TMZ.com, espn.com or weather.com ( http://www.weather.com/weather/map/interactive/94018?from=36hour_map_large&zoom=8&interactiveMapLayer=radar) cause immediate crashes.

Confining heavy Flash-using sites to separate instance(s) of iexplore.exe process(es) Probably minimizes crashes, even of those instances, and Certainly minimizes lost time following crashes, because only one process and a few tabs have to be re-opened. On my machine, however, a new IE7 process uses a minimum of about 30MB of memory.

Finally, this all IS Very Sad. In 2000, I was a senior member of a consulting team that assisted Macromedia in establishing a Customer Loyalty Program. The fact that it has taken Adobe so long to accomplish so little on this problem, which probably affects hundreds of thousands of direct customers and their sites’ users worldwide on a daily basis, suggests that the concept was clearly a casualty of the acquisition.

Someone explain to me why I posted in this forum and all of a sudden it dissapears?????????!

I tried upgrading to this beta and had worse troubles than I did with the current version of Flash Player.

It crashed immediately going to ESPN.com every single time.

Please respond to my posts and personal messages!!!!!!

Tired of dealing with crappy support.

I became more sympathetic (and I wasn't to start) when BWolfe wrote " ... Flash Player 9 was a complete rewrite of the ActionScript Virtual Machine to support ActionScript 3.0 ...". It's still not easy to forgive, but it's more understandable. At this point I am hopeful that a full and final fix is not far away. - greg

Quickie for people unprepared to wade through all this: V8 is available at http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266&sliceId=1

My "solution" was to return to V8 via the archive page. No problems since. I gave up when I got to a major corporate home page that absolutely woud not open. I contacted that company and they said they were well aware of it. I think they are going to remove Flash because of it.

From what's reported it's obvious to me this is a race condition. It's not caused, per se, by amount of memory, or tabs or suchwhat. These factors aggravate or trigger the underlying bug. It's like likely an I/O or interrupt wait that leads to buffer overflow or something similiar. Best solution (for Adobe) is to work with someone who has a 100% reproducible occurrence.

I just keep clicking "no" when it wants to upgrade to V9. Of course, unless I proactively follow this thread I'll never know if/when it is fixed.

I do not understand why Adobe would allow such a serious flaw in released code instead of doing a recall (re-releasing V8 as V9.1 until V9 is actually fit for release).

- Greg