What's wrong with FlashPlayer 13, or is it Firefox? Windows 7? Is it FP 13 itself? Are Shockwave & FP the same thing?

I am running an Acer Aspire laptop, 1.9Ghz Intel Celeron CPU, Windows 7, 64 bit, and 99% of the time, Firefox 29.0.1. RARELY, do I use IE. I am not very tech savvy at all, but I have attempted many different solutions, given to me from inquiries to several varying forum members with no luck. There are no extensions at my add-on page that have anything to do with FlashPlayer OR Adobe. I used a file path that someone sent to me, found an older version of Flash, right-clicked and deleted it. It was in my recycle bin, and on the advice of my wife, (who is much better with PC's than I)was going to uninstall this older version. I hadn't checked it in a day or two, but went to my recycle bin a few minutes ago, and somehow, it's disappeared. ??? There is something else. It is strange TO ME, but may not be to others. I took the same file path, ( C: Windows/ SysWOW64/ Macromed/ Flash ) that someone on a forum gave me to see my Flash version, except this time, instead of opening "Macromed", I opened "Adobe", and there is a file there that reads "Shockwave 12". ???  The same person that told me this file path, also said that a NPSWF32_13_0_0_214.dll file was the MOST IMPORTANT file in the FlashPlayer 13 folder, and as long as it was there, everything was OK with my updated Flash version. There IS NO SUCH FILE in the "Adobe / Shockwave 12" folder. The files in this folder, I, of course, do not recognize, but for the sake of this discussion, ( question ), there are 10 or so .dll files, 4 or 5 Application files, ( the .dll's are Application extensions ), one DCR file,(???), and a file folder named Xtras, that, when opened, shows (6) X32 files, and a text document named "autodownload". I AM SO VERY SORRY for this extremely long rant. It is a long, ongoing story. FP 13 won't playback 90% of the video I try while I am online.