i uninstall my flash player by accident on my windows 8 laptop

Wrong.   I uninstalled it just fine.  Now I am having the same problem as Stephen.  This is ridiculous.  Something went wrong with my flash player.  Not sure what. Just started out of the blue.  So I simply uninstalled it from control panel.  It was real easy.   No registry keys needed to be removed or anything.  That is just nonsense. You could easily accidently uninstall this product if you are not sure what you are doing.  I did not do it on accident however. Now it is uninstalled, but I still have the shockwave add on and it is enabled.  But that is a separate module.  Maybe that is what Mike meant. Idk.  I assume he is not just a liar.    Anyway, after I restarted my computer, I went to the Adobe site to reinstall flash player, and long story short.  Here we are.    I click the "download adobe flash player" link and it reroutes me to the installation help page.  Which tells me flash player is embedded with Windows 8.1 Internet explorer and gives me a link to the latest update for that. So I click on that, and it tells me I already have it.   So then I go to the installation problems for windows page here: Installation problems | Flash Player | Windows and at the bottom of the page are links to third party downloads. So I click the one for IE and viola! I think its working!  I get the permission prompt, I say yes, it starts downloading, I feel a moment of relief, then I get the Adobe box that comes up and I get this delightful message: "Your Microsoft Internet Explorer browser includes the latest version of Adobe Flash Player built-in.  Windows Update will inform you when new versions of Flash Player are available."  So once again, brick wall.

**Update:

I think I figured out part of the problem.  At some point it looks like I installed a third party flash player that corrupted Adobe. Not sure how that happened.  But it started giving me flash player script errors and other problems.  So I went to the Adobe site, and I followed the instructions.  The test said it was working but it wasn't.  I went to the gear icon, clicked on Saftey, and then enabled ActiveX filtering.   This solved my problem, but I was still wary, so I went to control panel and to the uninstall program link and found some odd version of flash player and uninstalled it and retarted.  Then all my problems started.  Because enabling ActiveX filtering made it work before, it did not occur to me to disable it again after I uninstalled the other flash player.  It had the name Adobe on it too, but it wasn't the normal icon.  I must have been infected by some malicious site at some point or a third party add on that I didn't notice from some other download.   I apologize for my rage.  I disabled the ActiveX filtering and now the test works but videos still don't play, like on MSN Hike For Your Lives! The Robots Can Navigate Trails Now.  Now I get an endless loading loop and an ERROR# 2048.   So back to the brick wall again.   So I had to reenable the ActiveX filtering and now videos play again, but the Adobe test wont work.

I also tried turning Internet Explorer off and back on again in Windows Features.   To no avail.   Seems my only option now is to try Windows Restore back to a point before all this crap happened.   No good.

Mostly I blame Microsoft because they are evil and they keep ruining everything with each new version of windows because they are greedy and corrupt. It was a stupid and uncessary idea to embed flash player in Internet Explorer for Windows 8.1.  Interesting how all this started when 10 came out.  Just another way they break their product to make you get the new version.