i have google chrome as my browser and am not able to upgrade flash player

Chrome has its own proprietary Flash Player called "PepperFlash". It functions independently of the ActiveX plugin (for IE) and standard plugin (for other browsers). You can ONLY update it by updating Chrome. I've had to completely uninstall and reinstall Chrome to do this on at least two machines. It's a pain, but Google wanted to have their own version, so they do.