Issues with flash player on multiple browsers?

Good evening,

I normally use Firefox as my default browser, but recently I have been experiencing issues with flash player (videos and websites that use it in particular).

The issue that I am experiencing on FF is that pages with videos or flash content (youtube is a biggie) will freeze up for a few seconds (the whole browser freezes) before I click on a video or another link.  The browser will then return to normal, but upon clicking on a video to watch or to a new page that has flash content on it, the issue reoccurs.

After not being able to resolve the issue on my own, I decided to switch over to Google Chrome, in hopes that i could get flash content to work without freezing up.

For a week or two everything worked perfectly.

But recently, similar issues have begun to occur.

Upon loading websites with flash player, the browser will freeze up for a few seconds before becoming functional again. (sometimes the website or whole browser remains laggy though)

Differently, though, loading videos appears to be very temperamental, as their loading speed is very irregular, and if I pause a video to check up on another webpage or application, upon returning to the video, I will normally get a youtube error (causing the video to refresh). Most of the time when the video refreshes, the audio does not work at all (and I have to refresh again to get the audio back).

Other video players don't work well either, I encounter similar issues using them, or they do not load at all (buffering forever).

Also websites that use flash in any of their features will respond very slowly or they do not work properly.

Normally I use a program called Sandboxie (which runs applications like web browsers in a sandboxed area of the computer); I have had a few glitches with this in the past, so I tried running the browsers normally (outside the sandbox), and still encountered the issues with flash.

Sometimes deleting all contents in the sandbox clear up issue encountered in the program; deleting its contents, however, did not fix the issue with flash.

I have also tried uninstalling and re-installing the latest version of flash; this did not fix the issue.

I have tried clearing all of my browser history/session info on both browsers (such as restoring firefox to it's original settings, in case I had accidentally tampered with something to cause these issue) , this has not helped either.

I have been running numerous virus scans with different programs to see if the issue was due to a bug -- nothing was detected.

I have checked the settings and plugins on each browser, flash was not tampered with or disabled.

And lastly, I am positive it has nothing to do with my internet connection, as I normally have 4-5 bars of strength, and all other web pages without flash content (or games on my desktop that connect to the web) do not load slowly or incorrectly.

(actually one more thing -- - this is a new laptop, barley over 2 months old; flash used to work perfectly on it, this issue suddenly started not too long ago)

I'm not sure how to fix this, and the issue appears to be getting worst; any help or suggestions in relation to this issue would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you for reading!

-Rebecca