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Known Participant
April 4, 2012
Question

Cannot uninstall Adobe Flash Player 11 Active X

  • April 4, 2012
  • 1 reply
  • 31840 views

Hello,

I am hoping someone out there can help.  I have been having a hard time uninstalling Adobe Flash Player 11 Active X from a large group of Windows XP SP3 PC's.  I run the latest Adobe Flash Uninstaller via a script and when I go into Add/Remove Program, I still see Adobe Flash Player 11 Active X listed there.  (I have hopefully attached a picture)

As you can, hopefully, see, it looks a little funny as the "Click here for more support info is missing."  What's more is when I go to http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ to test the Flash install using Internet Explorer 8, I get prompted to install Adobe Flash.  (Hopefully the second picture shows up)

I have tried running my script written as this:

"<network location>\uninstall_flash_player_32bit.exe" -uninstall -force and that does not work.

I also tried running a Powershell script and that does not work.

I did a search on the PC for flash.ocx and swflash.ocx and tried the regsrv32 -u trick and that does not work. 

As a last resort, I even tried running the Remove from one PC in Add/ remove programs to just see and I get this error:

I even click Browse and point this to the loation that has a copy of this file and I then get this error:

The only solution that really works is when I use Microsft's Installer Cleanup Utility and then run the Adobe Flash uninstaller again.

This is fine and dandy except I have MANY PC's that this has happened to and I would really like a foolproof way to completely remove Adobe Flash Player.  This needs to happen because I cannot successful install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player until this corrupted version gets removed.

Can anyone offer a solution?

Thanks.

matt

PS - Nice job updating the forums Adobe. 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

pwillener
Legend
April 5, 2012

Not sure why this is happening; the only thing I can think of that you may not be using the latest uninstaller?

Download: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-windows.html

Can you post the contents of the FlashInstall.log file (from C:\Windows\system32\Macromed\Flash) from one of the failed uninstalls?

Known Participant
April 5, 2012

OK.  I made some sort of progress, but need to figure out a better solution. 

I found that when I deleted the registry key HKCR\Installer\Products\{03797D32A1CEE534388FAABEEF25730B} the Control Panel icon disapeared and I was able to run my Adobe Flash Player Install script successfully. 

The problem now is that the script command I wrote did not work and I had to manually delete the key.

This is what I tried:

REG DELETE "HKCR\Installer\Products\{03797D32A1CEE534388FAABEEF25730B}" /f 

Once I manually deleted that key, I was able to reinstall Flash.  Unfortunately, i no longer have a test machine to try solutions on so I will need to find another broken Flash install

and figure out how to get my script to delete the key listed above. 

To answer your questions - I am using the latest uninstaller and when I find another broke Flash install, I will post the FlashInstall.log. 

chris.campbell
Community Manager
Community Manager
April 5, 2012

I'll forward this to our installer team, but as pat mentioned we'll need a FlashInstall.log from one of the affected systems.

Where do I find the Flash Player installation log on Windows?

Thanks,

Chris