Adobe flash player either hangs or crashes in Firefox

[Stingray99]

Adobe flash player either hangs up the web browser Firefox or crashes within Firefox.  This has been occurring for about a year even though Firefox and the adobe flash player have been updated and upgraded many times over the last year.  Multiple crash reports have been sent to either Adobe or Firefox (I am not sure which one actually gets the crash report) but it appears someone knows about this issue since I seem to be getting more pop up boxes from Firefox now when the Windows 7 system seems to hang (no response from mouse when I try to close the Firefox browser window).  The pop up box states that Adobe flash player is not responding or in a loop so when I respond to the pop up window to cancel the task all the flash player displays in all of the open Firefox browser sessions crash.  However, if I use google chrome and the same ESPN videos that use Adobe flash player so far I have not seen the same issue of hangs or crashes.  So, is this a known issue with Adobe flash player and/or Firefox or has it just never been fixed correctly?

Configuration:

Sony VPCF2390X - I7-2760QM - 8 GB - GEForce GT 540M - 1920 X  1200 Resolution

Windows 7 Home  Premium Service Pack 1 -  7.1.13.1088   64-bit

Firefox 23.0.1

Adobe Flash Player 11,8,800,115

Message was edited by: Stingray99

[C_F_McBlob]

Are both your Flash Player and Shockwave up to date?

[Guest]

I have the same problem on a computer with similar specs. I've even uninstalled, removed all the left behind stuff in the appdata and system files, and reinstalled. My virus scan is clear and my registry has no errors before and after instalation. My drivers are up to date. I'm also having trouble with games starting up as well. It all started about two days ago. Now I have to reload the page 20 times to get through a 7min video.

[Stingray99]

Thanks for responding C F McBlob.  I do not have Shockwave Flash installed and I am not aware of a dependency for Shockwave Flash when using just the Adobe Flash player.  I am not a game player.  The failures I get are highly intermittent (I can not predict when I will get a failure) and are just a by product of having many web browsers sessions active with Financial instituitions such as  Fidelity Investments, ESPN, ESPN3, various news agencies, etc. all of which use Adobe Flash player on their web sites.  According to the Adobe web site my version of Adobe Flash player is up to date.

What is so amazing is having an issue like this with so many large company websites that are all dependent on the Adobe Flash player and not being able to find an immediate solution.

[Stingray99]

Kitsunemaru, just to compare notes, I have never resolved an issue on a small system like a pc or even on a large system by re-installing software.  Re-installing does not fix bugs in the software.   However, in your case since it only showed up a couple of days ago, I would look for something that changed on your system during that time frame.

[C_F_McBlob]

I want you to try something to see if it will help this.

Copy the following (bold) text into a Notepad document (Don't use Wordpad or Word because they add formatting and it doesn't work😞

c:\windows\system32\cleanmgr.exe /dc /sageset: 1

c:

cd \

cd c:\windows\prefetch

del *.* /q

Save it to your desktop as "clean.bat" under "All file types".

Double click it and your Disk Cleanup will open, but not like it usually does.

Check EVERY box in the configuration window and close it.

Next, right click the "clean.bat" file and choose "Edit".

When it opens is Notepad, change "sageset" to "sagerun" and save it.

Double click it and let it run. This will do a "deep cleanup" of your hard drive. This will remove a bunch of temp files that may be affecting your browser and Flash Player.

[Guest]

Neat trick, McBlob. Havn't seen that suggested yet. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me.

Stingray, you're an idiot. Obviously something changed. If I knew what it was, I wouldn't be here. Also, reinstall works if the operating file have been attacked or damaged.

Seriously though, the amount of stuff I do in a day makes it impossible for me to pinpoint the time of the change. I managed to get IE to run its plug in without incident, but there's no way I'm going to actually use it. It does however, use a different version of flash.

Update: Something must have done the job. I retried in safe mode after all the different methods I've tried over the past two days, and it looks like the problem is now confined to an add on conflict. If I had to guess, I'd say there were multiple problems at the same time. Certainly more difficult to diagose to separate issues, but as long as it works I don't really what the other issue might have been. My hat is off to McBlob. I'd be willing to bet your solution shook something loose. Thx for the help.

[Stingray99]

I have run the clean.bat as you instructed.  I then tried to stress test both Firefox and Adobe Flash player using web sites like ESPN that have caused the issue in the past.  So far no failures, hangs or crashes.  However, since this has been an intermittent problem I would like to give it some time (at least a week) before I conclude anything.  It is encouraging that Kitsunemaru apparently has already gotten positive results from this so I am very hopeful this is a solution.  In either case thanks for your help so far. 

[Stingray99]

I encountered another Firefox/Flash session hang Friday but this was a little different than previous hangs.  First it happened while I was away from my PC and second I had three copies of the same pop up box that all appeared to be related to the same Firefox/Flash session.  Following is the content of each of the 3 popup box error messages:

Warning Unresponsive plugin

Shockwave Flash may be busy, or it may have stopped responding.  You can stop the plugin now, or you can continue to see if the plugin will complete.

Checkable Box – Don’t ask me again

                                   Clickable  Box – Continue          Clickable Box – Stop plugin

I did verify that all the other Firefox sessions (in this case 3) were still responding and working normally while the one session at "http://espn.go.com/blog/acc"

was hung or non-responsive.  Once I clicked the "Stop plugin" on one of the popup boxes the hung firefox session was then responsive so I got rid of the other two popup boxes.

[Guest]

Been having similar problems.  Mainly when visiting the bbc.co.uk web site and the trigger often seems to be an advert for Samsung.

The simple fix which I have done is simply to uninstall the useless flash player.

If I ever need it again I will install it and then uninstall it again afterwards.

[C_F_McBlob]

Nick-_-_-_-_ wrote:

Been having similar problems.  Mainly when visiting the bbc.co.uk web site and the trigger often seems to be an advert for Samsung.

The simple fix which I have done is simply to uninstall the useless flash player.

If I ever need it again I will install it and then uninstall it again afterwards.

This is why I use Firefox and AdBlock with three additional plugins to block Flash Ads from ever appearing.

[Guest]

What do you do about watching video at news sites and so forth? I sometimes see advice saying just uninstall the damn thing, but that makes a lot of video inaccessible, doesn't it?

[C_F_McBlob]

TalkBack101 wrote:

What do you do about watching video at news sites and so forth? I sometimes see advice saying just uninstall the damn thing, but that makes a lot of video inaccessible, doesn't it?

Yes it does. The adblockers eliminate a lot of junk from crashing my Flash Player. Having a Mac helps too because there's no Internet Exploder for it (no ActiveX garbage), so that eliminates 90% of my internet problems from ever occurring.

[Guest]

How do you navigate in Notepad to change "sageset" to "sagerun"?

[C_F_McBlob]

TalkBack101 wrote:

How do you navigate in Notepad to change "sageset" to "sagerun"?

Just click where you want to edit and backspace, then type run... or better yet, download the file I made here: https://workspaces.acrobat.com/app.html#d=LW2uMC-muU*eva7lwEmoww

It has the sageset and sagerun files already in it. Unzip it, run the "set" file, and then run the "run" file.

[Guest]

Yo, Mr. McBlob, I've tried the deepclean three times, at least I think I have.  I've run the "set" file, checking off all the boxes, and I've run "run," getting to the part where Disk Cleanup begins to calculate the space that can be freed on (C:\).  I never stuck around after that.  I assume it did its thing as it was supposed to.

There's no difference.  I'm still assailed by hanging, crashing and that insane message -- "Warning: Unresponsive plugin. Shockwave Flash may be busy or may have stopped responding."

Do you have any more ideas or do you know anyone who does.  If not, do you know how my predicament can be brought to the attention of the developers of Shockwave Flash?

[Guest]

I got to the part where you're supposed to change "sageset" to "sagerun," but I don't know how to navigate in Notepad.  My arrows don't move me around.

[Carm01]

I found a solution to the flash player crashes within Firefox, and have not had a single flash playser crash in 6 months at least. The solution involves creating a task to run at regular intervals to delete certain prefetch files. NOT all of them as it is NOT necessary to delete them all.

I have wrote a script that will create the folder structer in programdata/scripts/ and place the exe that actually does the deleting, and have successfully imported the task into task scheduler.

This should resolve all Flash player crashes within Firefox. I posted the information here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/968190?page=6#answer-511132

That script is not 100% Automated in the above link, but will get you started.

I have one that i have been able to fully automate, You would just need to check task scheduler in Windows 7 to confirm it will successfully import on its own.

I am looking for testers to confirm this works. This should work on windows 7 64 and 32 bit. Not tested on Windows 8

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nuljc6ywskryad6/FireFox-Flash-Fix%28x86%29_autoBeta.exe

Best regards

[Troudhyl]

Launch problem = prefetch problem, I knew it... What a shame that we can't have exceptions to prevent prefetching for some specific .exe .

Good job. I will search an other way: delete the concerned .pf files before each launch of Firefox instead of a background task... like insert a prerequisite execution... I don't know how. A firefox "patch" with code injection ?

[Carm01]

The prefetch files get re-created i seen, now in case of Plugin Container/Flash, i am not sure how and when it does, as sometimes flash content is on a page and might be prompted to be recreated as is the plugin container prefetech files?

Thats why its running as a task to ensure they are never there for any length of time.

Just deleting them once might only prevent it for awhile, but what if FF calls for the plugin container/flash, how is that handled though. I rather be safe personally, but if we can stop this altogether would be great. I think there is a deeper issue here within Flash/Firefox/Plugin container to be honest.

Anyway i provided my script for those who just want the crashing to stop and dont care how its done, i notice no preformance issues when running it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/emwjgwmv3jskqqh/FireFox-Flash-Fix%28x86%29_autoBeta.exe

[Carm01]

Any luck or results?

[Troudhyl]

Yesterday it didn't work, today it worked, I need to do more tests...

[Troudhyl]

Ok... You know that I have Flash crashes at the first launch. But it is not the rule. Maybe we don't have the same problem. I have crashes only when I open an external link (like my webmail), which launches Firefox and a new tab, then loading all the other tabs. When a tab with Flash is loaded, it crashs. Even after a del C:\Windows\Prefetch\FLASHPLAYERPLUGIN*.pf C:\Windows\Prefetch\PLUGIN-CONTAINER.EXE*.pf !

And when I just launch Firefox with its shortcut, without opening a new tab, no matter if I delete prefetch or not, I don't have problem (it's what I did yesterday). I hope you understand, sorry for my bad english

[Carm01]

@Troudhyl

I found another article out there that could help. I am currently testing it to see if there are any ill effects. It involves disabling some components in Firefox, as i believe that this might not be an adobe issue but a Firefox one. So far in my few hours of testing I have found no ill effects of the changes I made. Once I am satisified i will post the link to the article for anyone to try . Needless to say even though what i did has been asked numerous time in the Firefox forums, the MODS say it cant be done, which in not correct. They just dont think outside the box.

BTW to undo anything my script did simply run the following commands in cmd prompt

rmdir "C:\ProgramData\Scripts\" /s /q

SchTasks /Delete /TN "Clear Firefox Prefetch" /f

If after running the delete task one and throws an error stating no file exists, then the task was never created properly, but most of the time it usually created preperly when running the script.

I will post again later on today , most likely this evening ( NYC time ) after a full day of testing to see some things.

Also, have you tried making a new profile in Firefox?

Just run Firefox.exe -p make sure firefox is closed and try using the new profile

Best Regards

[Troudhyl]

Ok I just test with a new profile.

- firefox -p, creation of a "Test" profile

- in startup options, "display the last used tabs and windows", I don't know the sentences in english

- I open a tab on a Flash video, an other blank, then I close Firefox, no problem

- I launch it directly from shortcut, no problem, I reclose it

- I open my webmail (Outlook.com) from the Messenger shortcut in systray, so Firefox is launched by external link as default system browser. The tab with Flash causes a lot of Flash crashes, impossible to see some flash content.

Seems to be a Firefox issue, yes...