Can't uninstall Flash Player ActiveX on machines that were upgraded from Windows 7 to 10

Report · Nov 06, 2020

I've noticed while undeployed Flash from my fleet of systems that clients that were upgraded from 7 to 10 have an ActiveX MSI deployed to them.

I did spot this forum post: https://community.adobe.com/t5/flash-player/cannot-uninstall-flash-activex-msi-on-upgraded-win10/td-...

I feel like the answer there is a bit of a cop out - Adobe has far more leverage to work with Microsoft to fix this than our organization does.

Report · Nov 07, 2020

It's part of Windows 8 and 10, controlled by Microsoft. MS offer a patch to uninstall it (forever, irreversible).

Report · Nov 14, 2020

The Windows patch won't remove the entry in Add/Remove programs - in the screenshot in my own testing.

I agree at some point its kinda cosmetic, but if anything were to trigger a repair/reinstall - it might actually work.

Report · Nov 16, 2020

> Adobe has far more leverage to work with Microsoft to fix this than our organization does.

This is actually not the case. They care deeply about the satisfaction of their paying enterprise customers, and you have a lot of sway.

Honestly, I'd really recommend opening a support case. This is an issue that they'll need to provide a solution for, because we can't solve it from our end. It seems like an edge-case tied to an in-place upgrade, and is probably something they either already have a workaround for, or aren't easily able to replicate in their usual battery of tests.

It's very likely that it will loop back to the Edge team (and to me), but having it be tied to a concrete enterprise support case gives it much more weight than a suggestion coming from me (plus, their enterprise support folks are better equipped to capture the subtle Windows details at the heart of this). If you can give me a tracking number, I can point my colleagues on the Edge team to it, which might speed things along.

You're welcome to send me a DM with details.

Thanks!

Report · Nov 16, 2020

I really appreciate the help with this :). I pm'd you the MS support ticket. I suspect this might be a bigger issue as more enterprises around the world realize their install reports are a bit wonky after the full decomission of the product in January.

I do configmgr management at a biggish university and we like to be somewhat proactive in rolling these products back just to feel the waters as it were - mainly to make sure that every vendor who relies on Flash has a plan to upgrade.