Outlook email not working when there is an adobe flash player update

For what it's worth, Adobe uses Outlook.  We have something in the neighborhood of 10K employees.  Flash and Outlook don't really overlap.  If this were consistently happening to all Flash + Outlook users, I'd be getting non-stop flack about it from colleagues.

This seems coincidental, or self-inflicted (a too-tight windows security policy intersecting with something getting installed through the usual Windows installation mechanisms causes weird side-effects that are resolved by a reboot).

We also provide mechanisms for IT administrators to control the installation and roll-out of Flash Player.  It sounds like those aren't being managed in your environment.  It's totally possible for your system administrators to deploy Flash updates silently to managed machines, and to test those updates before rolling them out to your user population.  If you need Flash and are experiencing installation problems, your friendly IT person can do a lot of useful troubleshooting based on the Windows logs already on your machine.

I'm pretty curious about the details, because this is super weird, and I like weird.  The long and short of it is that Flash serves updates to billions of users on a monthly basis.  A 0.01% failure rate would crush us under support complaints.  Given the overlap in the Venn diagram of "people with Flash on their machines" and "people with Outlook at work", I'd have a concerned executive currently standing over my shoulder if this were a widespread issue.

Where the installer fails, there's a confounding factor involved.  Super weird behavior, like "your installer causes this completely unrelated application to stop working until I reboot" implies something really low-level going wrong, like the underlying storage is messed up (e.g. disk is corrupted or failing, running the installer perturbs it, outlook fails to read and locks up), or like oddball administrator-defined enterprise security settings get triggered by something the installer does without problem on normal machines, puts the system in a bad state until reboot, or maybe administrator-configured security software intervenes aggressively and puts the system in a similarly bad state.

Given that our installer succeds, I can't imagine that we're going to get anything interesting in our logs.  You should talk to your IT folks, and encourage them to look at the Event Logs on your machine for periods where Outlook failed.  If you're lucky, Windows is logging errors about whatever the underlying issues is, and will hopefully provide clues.  I'm super curious about what that underlying failure is, but I'm pretty confident that it's well outside our sphere of influence.  We're just tickling something underneath us that's in a bad state.