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S
SHTechs
Participant
December 4, 2012
Question

Internet Explorer 9 & Flash Player 11.5.502.110

  • December 4, 2012
  • 5 replies
  • 45773 views

Hey,

Since 2 weeks now we've had issues with the Flash Player 11.5.502.110 ActiveX on our Windows 7 machines,

Sites that contain any flash material are not able to load unless we disable the flash player addon in the Internet Explorer 9 Addons-list, trying to load a page containing flash causes the whole browser to freeze and eventually crash after about a minute.

For some reason having 11.5.502.110 installed, going to www.adobe.com and checking for an update seems to say "Yeah you need to update!" and it updates to 11.5.502.110 once again, was there some broken release of this version that has been hotfixed and requires re-downloading?

I've got around 200 machines with this issue right now.

Machines affected by this issue are running:

Windows 7 Enterprise SP 1

Internet Explorer 9

Flash Player 11.5.502.110

This topic has been closed for replies.

5 replies

R
Adobe Employee
robert_kwon
Adobe Employee
January 12, 2013

Thanks for all of the info and feedback everyone.  We've narrowed down and determined the cause of why non-administrator accounts on Windows was experiencing this buggy behavior.  We've fixed the bug, so it will be included in one of the upcoming betas/releases.  I'm not sure which one, so I can't comment on that.

T
Tom_at_Pax
Participant
January 5, 2013

I was also having IE9 crash whenever I tried to access Flash material. The version of Flash I am using is 11.5.502.1135.

As reported by Overall in post 20, I also found that there was no Flashutil dll file in the C:\Windows\System32\Macromed folder. In my case, I had no where to go to get the missing dll file. Following the suggestion of MarcCahill in post 22, I looked at the Users permissions for the Macromed folder and found they were set to Read & Execute. I changed the permsissions to Full Control and then tried accessing Flash material again. It worked. I inspected the Macromed folder and found that FlashUtil32_11_5_502_135_ActiveX.dll had been written there. The file date and time corresponded to when I had accessed the Flash material.

A
allenchr
Participant
January 9, 2013

Just want to chime in that I have had this issue since August. It started with flash 11.4 and carried through with 11.5.

Flash works well on the master image, sysprep it with local admin, deploy the image via Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and then flash will hang on any profile on the imaged computer.

Next image update I am rolling back to 11.3 but I will check on the permissions to the C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\ on the next pc I deploy to see if there is a permissions issue there.

For now our techs have been uninstalling/reinstalling flash player to fix this.

A
allenchr
Participant
January 9, 2013

Update: Freshly imaged machine, deployment finishes and local administrator is logged into the computer. Launch IE9, homepage with flash objects present on the page loads no issue.

Logout, log back in as a domain profile without admin rights. Load home page, ie hangs. Close iexplore with task manager.

Gave users full control to c:\windows\syswow64\system32\Macromed\ and retry ie. Flash player loads no issue.

Checked the Flash folder under Macromed and the file FlashUtil32_11_5_502_135_ActiveX.dll was just created, all the other files in that folder have a modified date of when flash was installed on the master image.

How do we submit a bug report to get this looked at?

A
AshiOni
Participant
December 11, 2012

We are having the exact same issue. We have hundreds of workstations down, disable or remove flash 11.5.502.110 and everything goes back to normal.

However this is a major issue for us as all of our employees use a web based application that requires both IE and flash to login / punch out / get paid, etc.

Flash player 11.5.502.110

IE 9

Both win7 32/64 (mostly 32 bit)

I will add that we are in a virtualized desktop environment. I haven't ruled this out as a factor however this has been in place for years now without any kind of issues like this in the past.

We have done all of the linked work arounds / fixes and wild suggestions we have been able to find so far.

Needless to say this is a major political issue where I work because our employees are unable to retrieve their pay checks.

EDIT

Something odd I noticed - This DOES NOT appear to be a problem for INTRAnet web sites or web sites added to the trusted web sites zone within IE 9.

I'd also like to add that the outlined problem DOES brick all other web sites, not just those with adobe flash content. To test this I have tried to go to simply HTML pages we posted and are able to produce the same results.

Message was edited by: AshiOni

S
SHTechsAuthor
Participant
December 11, 2012

I was messing around on yet another machine that I found out had the issue and suddenly stuff worked out in the end, I have no idea what made it work but here's what was done.

I began by booting up the machine that the user said she had issues with connecting to any page using flash, in our case the sites we used to test this was www.arla.se and www.eniro.se

Both of these pages will crash the browser on machines with this issue at our site.

Logging on with the local administrator account on the machine would have all pages working with no issue, I checked if the shockwave plugin was disabled and it wasn't, everything was enabled and the sites would load.

However, logging on to a regular user account with no administrative rights would still have the issue, tried this on several accounts.

I proceeded to try running the fix that was linked, which clearly in the video he stated the fix being for 2 completely different issues, the fix did nothing, the issue remained.

At this point I decided to check out whether it could have been related to permissions as admin accounts (both local and my domain admin account which is set to have local administrative rights on the machine in question) would have no issues with loading pages.

So I go to the c:\Windows\SysWoW64\Macromed\Flash folder, grant my regular user full permissions to it, but the issue remained and I removed the permissions from this folder. At this point I logged out, let the other user log on to her account and suddenly pages would work with shockwave enabled.

Are there any permissions related to the fact of Flash Player fixing itself if it's allowed to? With the events that I described above there's nothing to follow up on, it just macigally started working or flash player is smart enough to fix itself if I give it permissions to do so.

Also how can this only affect users and not admins?

chris.campbell
Community Manager
chris.campbellCommunity Manager
Community Manager
December 12, 2012

Do you notice any difference if you disable protected mode in Internet Options?

Open internet explorer.

Click on Tools menu and select Internet Options.

Select Security Tab in the Internet options windows.

Select Internet from the zone settings.

Uncheck Enable Protected Mode option to disable the protection from Security for this zone.

Hit Apply and Ok

jeromiec83223024
Community Manager
jeromiec83223024Community Manager
Community Manager
December 4, 2012

Moved to the Using Flash Player forum, as this is not related to the Flash Player 11.5 Beta.

There's not a lot of detail to work with here, but I'm thinking it's a permission thing.  I'm assuming your workgroups are members of a Windows domain, probably have some Group Security Policies in play, and are not local Administrators. 

As a troubleshooting step, it would be interesting to know if this resolves the issue:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4323109

Here's the full installation troubleshooting guide:

http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/installation-problems-flash-player-windows.html#main-pars_heading_10

Getting the installation logs from a machine experiencing this problem would be interesting.

The Flash Player Administrator's Guide is also an excellent resource, with recommendations on how to best distribute and manage Flash Player installations in your organization:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player_admin_guide.edu.html

Hopefully this is a good start.  Let us know how it works out, and provide us with as much specific detail as possible if you're still stuck.

Thanks!

S
SHTechsAuthor
Participant
December 5, 2012

Hi,

Thanks for moving the topic, I've no clue how I managed to post it in the beta section.

Anyhow,

Yes none of our users have any administrative rights, they can't install anything other than browsers pretty much.

I however fail to see how this is connected to the fact that various flash player versions cause major slowdowns on our machines.

Yesterday I noticed a machine running 11.4 and it also had the same issue with any page containing anything with flash would take forever to attempt to load until IE eventually crashes.

The machines we first encountered this problem on had their flash player installed between the 8th and 11th of November 2012, the version number said 11.5.502.110.

We are running DELL KACE as our computer management tool, I did not receive any update to my Flash Player there until 1 week after this date, at around the 14th / 15th of November if we went back to adobe.com and tried to "Update" flash player it'd say "Hi, there's a new version" and download 11.5.502.110 again thus fixing the problem.

So the question at hand is, was there some early release of the 11.5.502.110 that was broken and a hotfix was deployed without changing the version number? I honestly refuse to believe we had over 200 machines randomly fail installations and require us to re-install them from the homepage.

Seeing as this same error is now appearing on machines running 11.4 releases I'd love to know what is causing this, there's no guarantee that this is even caused by Flash Player itself unless there's a mixture of problems appearing when Internet Explorer 9 works together with certain releases of Flash Player.

For now all I can do to save my feet is to deploy 11.5.502.110 again and hope that it overwrites the 11.4 versions.

jeromiec83223024
Community Manager
jeromiec83223024Community Manager
Community Manager
December 5, 2012

Your original description says that the browser hangs for a minute, then crashes on sites containing Flash.  This sounds like classic symptoms for a permission problem. 

I'm guessing that the browser tries to invoke the player, the player can't run/respond, the browser is stuck waiting for a response, it eventually times out, but everything's in a bad state now, and it takes the browser down.

We don't test DELL KACE for deployment, and my guess is that the permission issue is related to the deployment mechanism and/or some combination of group security policies in play.

If running the fix permissions scripts in my first response resolves the issue, we've narrowed it down to a set of registry keys that aren't getting set properly.  At that point, we can check the list of what the script fixes against an affected machine to figure out what's not getting set.

If it's a bug in our MSI installer, we'll get it filed and fixed in a future release (although we tend to get a gigantic wave of bug reports and forum posts when there's a widespread problem, and with Flash Player 11.5.502.110 having been in the market for a few weeks already, I'm not seeing a corresponding trend there). 

If it's a problem with KACE, or with how Flash Player is configured for deployment through KACE, we/you have a very clear set of actionable repro steps to give to Dell. 

If it's a Group Security Policy preventing the right keys from getting written, you'll have a good place to start troubleshooting your policy configuration.

If setting the registry permissions with the script on an affected machine doesn't resolve the problem, something else is probably going wrong with the installation. 

I'd recommend trying to uninstall and re-installing on a single affected machine.  If that resolves the issue, we should be able to diff the installtion logs between that machine and an affected machine and figure out what's happening.

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