Gray Circle of Death (GCOD) on new laptop

The gray circle is Flash Player's Out Of Memory icon.  Typically, this is thrown when Flash Player attempts to allocate memory, but none is available.  On a modern system, this is usually a symptom that the content is using a *lot* of RAM.  It's also possible that content that you have in another tab is what's really causing the problem, and it's just showing up in Cricut when it tries to do reasonable things.  Try closing all of your other browser windows, apps and tabs, and running the Cricut app by itself, if you haven't done that already.

In general, we'd recommend the content developer take a look with our free profiling tool Adobe Scout, to figure out what's going on.  Typically, this is a symptom that content is allocating a lot of objects, but failing to releasing them in a way that allows unused objects to be garbage-collected.

We also occasionally use the OOM logic as a way to safely halt when we encounter a pattern of instructions that appears to be unsafe from a security perspective.  Since Cricut is a fairly large product, I'm assuming that the content isn't malicious, but may be corrupted, or compiled with a buggy non-adobe compiler or something.

As an end-user, there's not much you can do about this beyond experimenting with the available browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox) to see if you have better luck elsewhere.  Each of those browsers uses a distinct version of Flash Player and has a distinct plug-in architecture, so you may find that one works better with this specific application.

In terms of the Cricut application, if someone from Cricut engineering identifies a language-level problem that is causing the issue, or needs help debugging, they're more than welcome to drop me a private message, and I'll get them looped in with the right technical experts to help them get it resolved.  You're more than welcome to share this thread with them.  To private message me, simply click my name in the post, and shoot me a note with contact information, and I'll get a discussion started.

Thanks!